Sermon Illustrations

Researcher Arthur Brooks tells the story of a college student enrolled in an introductory astronomy class. She wasn’t a science major. She walked into class each week carrying the same worries we all carry, but after 90 minutes in class studying galaxies, nebulae, and the billions of stars swirling above us, she would walk out of class feeling strangely… relieved. Why? Because, she said, “I am just a speck on a speck.”

It sounds like an insult—but for her, it was liberation. Standing in awe before something vast made her smaller, and in becoming smaller, she found peace. Brooks argues that we become miserable when we try to make ourselves big—important, admired, at the center of everything. But when we shrink in honest humility, we lose ourselves in wonder.

And this, Scripture says, is exactly where God meets us: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). And “When I consider your heavens… what is man that you are mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:3–4).

We are, as Brooks puts it, “specks”—but “beloved specks.” In the vast universe God created, He knows your name, your needs, and calls you His own. True humility is not thinking less of yourself—it’s seeing yourself honestly before a God immeasurably great.

Researcher Arthur C. Brooks gave a summary based on numerous studies on the benefits of gratitude: Thankfulness raises human beings’ happiness. It stimulates the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, part of the brain’s reward circuit. Gratitude can make us more resilient, and enhance relationships by strengthening romantic ties, bolstering friendships, and creating family bonds that endure during times of crisis. It may improve many health indicators, such as blood pressure and diet. Gratitude can make us more generous with others, more patient, and less materialistic.

Gratitude also appears to be something that you can improve through practice. For example, in a 2018 study, four psychologists randomly split a sample of 153 human subjects into groups that were assigned to either remember something they were grateful for or think about something unrelated. The grateful remembering group experienced more than five times as much positive emotion as the control group. Regularly practicing gratitude and praise to God really will make us more thankful people.

Some disregard man’s need to be rescued as a mere trifle. David Litt, a former Obama speechwriter, describes his efforts to learn surfing. While his daredevil brother-in-law joked, “It’s only drowning” Litt describes in his book, “It’s Only Drowning” one of his worst wipeouts.

“For a long time I was weightless. In free fall. Bracing myself to hit the water with a full-body slap. But the impact never came. The crashing lip, as powerful as a jackhammer, blasted through the surface, and I flew down the resulting sinkhole until my right hip bounced against the sand. Then the sea washed over me like a coffin lid and the hold-down buried me alive.

At first I held it together. Don’t worry. Wait it out. But I’d developed a mental hourglass…and I could feel it running dry. I’d never been underwater this long before. I’d never pinwheeled so violently. I raised an arm, expecting to punch through the ocean’s surface, but all I felt was more ocean. Water streamed up my nose and down my throat. How deep am I? How long have I gone without breathing? Something’s wrong. Panic setting in, I thrashed frantically upward, water surging through the corners of my mouth each time I fought to suppress a breath. When, finally, the wave lost interest, I burst into the sunlight and took shallow, rapid breaths. My neck was sore with whiplash, my tonsils swollen from salt.”

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Drowning is no joke. Separation from God is no joke. Spurgeon’s quote could be paired with this illustration.

“A man who is drowning does not need to be told how to swim; he needs to be pulled out of the water. And so the sinner, sinking under the weight of his sin, does not want directions, but deliverance. He is not a free agent who can save himself if he will; he is a captive, bound hand and foot, unless the strong arm of grace shall rescue him.”

C. H. Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, vol. 11 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1865).

Author and journalist Kelsey McKinney is co-creator of the podcast “Normal Gossip” and has written for The New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair. In her 2025 book “You Didn’t Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip”, McKinney explores the world of gossip in pop culture, celebrities and in everyday life. In one chapter entitled “Thou Shalt Not Gossip”, she details her evangelical upbringing and her struggles between trying not to sin and her innate need and desire to gossip.

“I was taught growing up that everyone had a thorn shoved deep into their side, impossible to dig out on their own. The thorn couldn’t be ripped out with pliers or cut out with a scalpel because it was inside of you from birth, a kind of predetermined bodily failure created just for you. The thorn was a metaphor, of course, but it was a metaphor that would ruin your life if you let it, because the thorn was the thing that kept you from holiness, from goodness, from the shiny pearly gates of Heaven. For some, the thorn was greed or pride or wrath or lust or gluttony. But I learned quickly that my thorn was made of whispers and cupped hands and wide eyes. The thorn I thought I needed God to rid me was the one thing I loved most in the world: gossip.”

Even during a sermon McKinney often couldn’t get her thoughts away from gossip:

“No matter how hard I tried to tell myself that gossiping was wicked, and that God hated it, the stories just stuck to my brain. Nothing else stuck there: not multiplication tables or vocabulary words or what I had done over the weekend. But the gossip stayed. I could not remember the citation for important verses in the Bible, but I could remember that at Bible study last week, a girl had asked for everyone to pray for her ability to have patience with her parents as they fought. While the pastor guided the focus of the congregation into a close reading of verses about humility and Jonah, I watched her parents, seated far away from me, and noticed how they leaned apart. Would they get divorced? It was so much easier to focus on the drama than on anything the Bible said.”

McKinney offers a good metaphor for her experience of gossip:

“And every single time I gossiped, it felt like my body was a two-liter soda bottle all shaken up. The drama and the intrigue and the secrets fizzed inside of me. Sometimes the story was too good, a Mento swallowed before I could convince myself not to, and it would all come bubbling out to the surface in a geyser of gossip.”

McKinney gives a stark and flagrant portrayal of the inner workings of choosing sin over holiness:

“In high school I wrote in dry-erase marker on the mirror in my room Ephesians 4:29, in my curly, looping handwriting, ‘Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building up others according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.’ I read the verse a half-dozen times every day, branded the words and their cadence into the soft tissue of my brain so that later, those grooves would burn when I ignored them and chose sin instead.”

As a young woman she soon chose to walk away from the Gospel:

“I stopped praying for God to take away my desire to gossip and eventually I stopped praying altogether. Without the fear of sin, I was able to stop policing my engagement with gossip, which in turn let me gossip more …… Maybe being a gossip is simply part of my identity and personality, unremovable and consistent.”

Randy Loubier and his family were reeling from a series of tragedies: his son’s girlfriend, Kira, had just died in a car crash, and less than three weeks earlier, another son’s girlfriend, Ashley, had committed suicide. On top of this, Randy’s career in finance had collapsed after he was fired for being a whistleblower, and his family was at risk of losing their home.

At Ashley’s funeral, a family friend named Debbie was the only light in their darkness, offering support and kindness. Later, at Kira’s wake, Randy was surprised when Kira’s mother, despite her own grief, expressed concern for Randy’s son: “I am so sorry Zach lost Ashley… When all this is over, would it be okay if I spend a little time with Zach?” Randy was stunned: “She just lost her daughter, her best friend, and she wants to care for my son? Who does that?”

Debbie then introduced Randy to her pastor, who invited both sons to a new grief group. Moved by the compassion of these Christians, Randy’s wife announced, “I’m going to start going to church.” Soon after, Randy’s father-in-law sent him a Bible. Though previously skeptical of Christianity, Randy decided to read it: “God, if you are in this book, I am going to be super upset, because I will have been wrong for 50 years. But I guess…I want to know.”

As he read, Randy was convicted about his own failings and gradually fell in love with Scripture. Weekly meetings with the pastor deepened his faith. When he reached the Gospels, he realized, “Jesus had been speaking to me all along.” Randy reflects, “Jesus, the Word, is everything to me. He saved me… But make no mistake, the church first sparked my curiosity. If God’s people hadn’t made me wonder about their peculiar love, I never would have cracked open God’s Word, and I never would have fallen in love myself.”

In his book “The Future of Truth,” Werner Herzog writes about the pursuit of truth.

“No one knows what it is, truth. Least of all the author. But philosophers don’t know either, nor mathematicians, not even the Pope in Rome knows what it is, though he has his faith and the certainty of salvation to draw on…

Is there such a thing in human nature as readiness to accept lies?…

…A willingness to deceive ourselves seems to be an essential part of our makeup. ..

Show business lives entirely from our willingness to suspend our disbelief. We buy tickets for a magical performance, where we are quite willingly misled. Wrestling bouts are another instance. They draw huge audiences, even though everyone knows they ‘re not real fights, but highly choreographed spectacles. Regardless, the spectators are passionately engaged in these fights, as though they were perfectly real.

God did not create us to be loners. From the beginning He said being alone was not good. One value that others supply to our life is motivation. Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant write of this as they tell the story of a mother who wanted to be a superhero for her children.

When we focus on others, we find motivation that is difficult to marshal for ourselves alone. In 2015, U. S. Army major Lisa Jaster was attempting to graduate from the elite Ranger School. Having served in Afghanistan and Iraq, she thought she could complete the grueling program in nine weeks. But getting through land navigation, water survival, staged assaults, ambushes, mountaineering, and an obstacle course took her twenty-six weeks. The final event was a twelve-mile march carrying a thirty-five-pound rucksack plus nine quarts of water and a rifle. By the ten-mile mark, Lisa felt nauseous, her feet were blistered, and she thought there was no way she could make it to the finish line. But then an image flashed through her mind—a cherished picture of her and her kids. Her son had Batman on his T-shirt and her daughter had Wonder Woman on hers. On the photo Lisa had written, “I want to be their superhero.” Lisa ran the last two miles and beat her target time by a minute and a half. She went on to make history as one of the first three women to become an Army Ranger.

Ten years ago, a young husband and father named Nathaniel had dreamed for years of becoming a pastor.. But seminary was expensive. His family needed stability. And perhaps most honestly, he felt unprepared. “How could I lead people down a path I barely know myself?”

A pastor at his church mentioned that a member owned a plumbing company and was hiring. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t ministry. It wasn’t what he pictured when he imagined serving God. But he prayed, “Lord, make me the kind of person who could someday be a pastor,” and he took the job. Ten years later, he’s still a plumber—and he says it’s the best thing that ever happened to his spiritual life.

You wouldn’t expect spiritual formation to happen while kneeling under a sink or installing a water heater. But Nathaniel discovered what many Christians forget: the Christian life is learned in ordinary work with ordinary people.

Wrench in hand, he learned to pray while working. He discovered what saints taught: that work and prayer aren’t enemies but partners. Manual labor demanded all of him—mind, strength, attention, humility. And as he gave all of himself to his work, he learned to give all of himself to God.

Somewhere between tightening pipes and thumbing through theology books at night, Jesus reshaped him—not into the pastor he dreamed of becoming, but into a follower whose whole life had become a prayer. Nathaniel says, “This isn’t the life I expected, but it’s the life for which I prayed.”

For much of the last half-century, Sweden was held up as the clearest picture of a secular future. Church attendance hovered around five percent. Belief in God collapsed. As Swedish church historian Joel Halldorf describes it, religion wasn’t angrily rejected—it was gently dismissed. But in recent years, Sweden has seen unexpected signs of change: open conversations about faith at intellectual dinner tables, and—most surprising of all—young people showing up in churches.

Across the Western world, similar signals are appearing. In Britain, journalists speak of a “quiet revival.” In France, the Catholic Church reports a stunning surge: more than 7,400 teenagers baptized at Easter in 2024. In the United States, Pew Research notes that the long decline of religious affiliation has flattened, especially among younger adults.

Globally, Gen Z is now more religious than their boomer parents—a reversal once thought nearly impossible. Musician Nick Cave observed that a decade ago, talking about God at a dinner table would get you laughed out of the room. Now, he says, people listen. There is “a kind of need” in the air.

Halldorf argues that there’s an erosion of faith in secular progress itself. When reason, technology, and prosperity stopped delivering hope, people didn’t stop longing. They started searching again. And in the Western world that search is becoming visible.

Hector Vega’s journey to faith began in the most unlikely place: Rikers Island Prison. One night, correction officers rushed in. An inmate named Jose Vega had committed suicide. Due to a mix-up, prison staff mistakenly identified Hector as the deceased and notified his family. For several days, while the prison was on lockdown, Hector’s family believed he was dead.

Reflecting on this, Hector said, “There’s something powerfully symbolic in how I was ‘dead’ but not yet buried. Looking back on this moment in my life, I believe God was beginning to show me that although I was physically alive, I was spiritually lifeless.”

Raised in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, Hector struggled with feelings of inadequacy. To fit in, he began drinking at 11, then moved to marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. Multiple prison sentences followed. A turning point came through his girlfriend Michelle, who, frustrated by his addiction and aware he wasn’t ready for fatherhood, turned to God and prayed for his deliverance. She encouraged Hector to attend a Christian recovery program.

Hector recalls, “I also started feeling deep remorse and shame over the pain I had caused people in my family, especially my mom and dad. So, I started attending prison chapel services. From there I started reading the Word of God, and gradually it got a tight hold on my heart.” He clung to passages like Psalms 27 and 91, and Galatians 5:1–13, which speaks of freedom in Christ.

With the support of mentors, Hector surrendered his life to Christ. Since then, he has served as executive director of a homeless shelter and addiction-recovery program, and since 2009, as pastor of East Harlem Fellowship. Married to Michelle for 30 years, they have raised four children. Hector now travels globally, sharing, “When the world had labeled me an addict and a career criminal, his love and mercy overwhelmed me… I was made in his image and worthy of being presented as a trophy of his grace.”