Sermon Illustrations

Kyle Zunker began suffering terrifying panic attacks in his late teens, which only worsened over time. By 2015, desperate for answers, he underwent an MRI while clinging to anxiety medication and hope. The scan was clear, leaving doctors puzzled and Kyle still searching for relief.

Seven years earlier, Kyle had left home for college. Though raised Christian, his faith was nominal and quickly unraveled. He writes, “I wanted to be the most successful and important person in the world. The more self-oriented my life became, the more I subscribed to intellectual arguments against the existence of God. By my early 20s, I was a staunch atheist.”

As he chased achievement, his health collapsed. His first panic attack at 19 left him desperate and overwhelmed. Anxiety became a constant presence, and he bounced from doctor to doctor, self-medicating to cope. He pinned his hope on passing the bar exam and proposing to his girlfriend, Hannah. When both dreams came true, he was shocked to find no peace: “If those hadn’t brought peace, then what could?”

Before their wedding, Kyle and Hannah often passed Pearl Street Church in San Antonio. Hoping to boost his respectability, he suggested they attend. Expecting to scoff, he was instead moved by a sermon on Genesis 22. Kyle recalls, “God’s instruction to Abraham was not a sadistic test; it prophetically foreshadowed the work of Jesus… God did not require Abraham to pay that price but chose instead to pay it himself.”

Over the next months, he read the New Testament and kept attending church, but anxiety persisted. One sleepless night, exhausted and broken, he finally prayed, “Thy will be done.” He writes, “Everything changed that night. The peace of God… changed my life. It gave me power over anxiety and fear, and my body began to heal as joy and hope replaced depression and despair.”

In Japan, the average Protestant church has fewer than 50 people. Missionaries quietly refer to Japan as a “graveyard.” No wonder one famous Japanese author wrote, “Japan is a swamp… whenever you plant the sapling of Christianity, the roots begin to rot.” And yet—God has not given up on Japan.
Consider Pastor Lam Wai Chan, a reluctant missionary from Singapore. He arrived in Tokyo assuming he would “fix” a struggling congregation. Instead, he discovered a few elderly believers who had weathered decades of disappointment and still showed up, still prayed, still loved Christ. Lam felt God confronting him gently: “They have faithfulness. What about you?”

So Lam offered the whole sinking church back to God. No flashy programs. No clever marketing. Just prayer. Slowly—beautifully—the church doubled. Children returned. New families wandered in without invitation. Lam tells anyone who listens: “God promised to preserve this church, and He has never failed me once.”
Or consider Pastor Mizuno, who has served the same rural congregation for nearly 50 years. When she returned to simply helping each person meet God daily in Scripture, the congregation revived, growing from a handful to more than a hundred. Her testimony is simple: “I made mistakes. But I was faithful. God sustained us.”

Japan remains less than 1% Christian. The soil still seems hard. Revival may come slowly. But faithfulness is its own miracle.

When Ken Johnson of Altadena, California, noticed bricks scattered under his house and the crawl-space frame torn apart, he suspected a raccoon or maybe a stray dog. But when he installed a camera, he woke up one morning to a shocking discovery: a 550-pound black bear had moved in. Not for a visit. Not for a night. It had settled in.

For more than a week, Johnson heard the bear’s heavy breathing and dragon-like hissing through a vent beneath his kitchen floor. He watched it stroll down the sidewalk like it owned the place. It rummaged through his garbage, dragged bricks around, and made itself increasingly at home. He tried everything to send it packing—leaf blowers, air horns, blasting music, even running the washing machine on spin cycle.

Nothing worked. The bear grew more comfortable, not less. Experts told him the real danger wasn’t the bear’s presence—it was allowing it to remain long enough to believe the crawl space was its den. Once that happened, getting it out would be far harder and far riskier.

It’s a striking picture of how certain things enter our lives. Not all at once, and not always with obvious danger. A small compromise here, a quiet resentment there, a habit that begins with a shrug. At first it seems manageable, even harmless. But left unchallenged, it begins to rearrange the interior of our lives the way that bear rearranged the bricks under Johnson’s house—slowly, persistently, until it settles in.

And once it settles, it does not leave easily.

Nearly 300 years ago, Messiah was born not out of cultural confidence but out of anxiety, grief, and deep uncertainty. George Frideric Handel lived in a world marked by disease, political unrest, and religious division. Families buried children regularly. Nations argued over legitimacy and power. Beneath the wealth of empire lay human enslavement and moral fracture. It was not a hopeful age.

The words of Messiah did not come from Handel himself but from Charles Jennens, the troubled aristocrat who assembled its biblical text. Jennens suffered recurring despair and depression. He had lost a brother to suicide. Searching for a way through his darkness, he turned to Scripture—not to argue, but to endure. He gathered passages that traced a path from promise to suffering to redemption, beginning not with triumph but with a whisper: “Comfort ye, my people.”

Handel composed the music in just 24 days. At its premiere in Dublin in 1742, one of the most haunting moments came when Susannah Cibber stepped forward to sing, “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Cibber herself had been publicly shamed and abused. The audience knew her story. As she sang of Christ’s suffering, silence filled the hall. One listener reportedly stood and said, “For this be all thy sins forgiven.” The gospel was no abstraction that night—it was embodied.

Later, Messiah became linked to care for abandoned children through performances benefiting London’s Foundling Hospital. Words like “For unto us a child is born” rang out beneath balconies filled with the forgotten.

Messiah endures because it names grief, injustice, and death—and then insists, with Scripture, that they are not the final word.

In the winter of 1909, a young man trudged through the streets of Vienna..His beard was unkempt. His coat—bought at a pawnshop—was threadbare, and his shoes looked ready to fall apart. He had no home, no destination, and no community. The man was Adolf Hitler.

He drifted from flophouse to flophouse, sleeping in doorways when he had no money for a bed. He sold crude postcards he painted for tourists and often went hungry. He was consumed by a longing to belong. It is almost impossible to imagine that this homeless drifter would, within three decades, command one of the most murderous regimes in history. But Hitler’s years of vagrancy—what he later called the period when he “grew hard”—offer a chilling lesson about what happens when human beings are severed from home, place, and spiritual community.

From 1908 to 1913, Hitler was rootless in every sense. He had been rejected twice by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. His mother was dead. He had no family, friends, no trade, no church, and no sense of purpose. He was spiritually adrift.
And in that homelessness, he found something dark to cling to. Vienna’s toxic antisemitic culture offered him an explanation for his suffering and, more importantly, a community defined by resentment. It gave him identity through blame and belonging through hatred.

We were made for place, for people, and for purpose. When those bonds are severed we become desperate who will cling to anything that offers identity, even if it is monstrous.

But the Church remains a home, calling to wanderers: Come in. Find rest. Find belonging. Find hope. The Church is the answer to nomadic modernity.

Joseph Kim grew up in North Korea with loving parents, but his world changed during the Great Famine of the 1990s. When he was 12, his father died of starvation, and soon after, his mother and sister left for China in search of food. His mother returned alone, having sold his sister into bride slavery-a common fate for young North Korean refugees. Later, his mother was imprisoned by the North Korean government, leaving Joseph alone and homeless on the streets.

For three years, Joseph survived by begging and sleeping in the mountains. At 15, facing starvation, he made the dangerous decision to escape North Korea by crossing into China. There, an elderly Chinese Korean woman advised him to seek help at a church. He found a church, where members gave him small amounts of money and temporary shelter. The kindness of these Christians, who helped a stranger without expecting anything in return, sparked his curiosity about their faith.

At another church, he saw the words, “Come To Me, All You Who Are Weary And Burdened, And I Will Give You Rest.” Joseph recalls, “It was as if someone was talking directly to me. I thought I heard a voice saying, ‘I understand how exhausted you are and what a hopeless situation you are in. I will take care of you.’” A Christian woman took him in, encouraged him to read the Bible, and gave him the name “Joseph.” He prayed, “God, I don’t know who you are or whether you exist as the Bible and Christians claim. But I need your help.”

With help from activists and Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), Joseph eventually escaped to the United States in 2007 as a refugee minor, attended high school, and began to build a new life. Reflecting on his journey, Joseph writes, “I had been alone in the world. Finding Christians in China, I found hope again. Caring for strangers, acting compassionately without expecting anything in return: That is the beauty of the gospel.”

It might be human nature, especially for those who don’t look to religion for answers, to try to come up with a theory of reality and life, the purpose of us being here and how long will all this last. An article in the Wall Street Journal reported on Elon Musk’s theory.

“It can be hard to understand Elon Musk’s reality—especially as he appears to be on track to become the world’s first trillionaire this year. Even he questions that reality. For the longest time, Musk has talked about the possibility that we’re living in a computer simulation.

“I do have this theory about predicting the future, which is that the most interesting outcome is the most likely,” Musk said during a podcast appearance a few weeks ago.
It is an idea rooted in the thinking that if our reality really is a simulation, we would get shut down if we were boring.

“Another way to think of it is like we could be an alien Netflix series and that series is only going to get continued if our ratings are good,” Musk said. “If you apply Darwin to simulation theory then only the most interesting simulations will continue. Therefore, the most interesting outcome is most likely because it’s either that or annihilation.

“So,” he added, “really, we have one goal: Keep it interesting.”

In central London in 2009, red buses had a bold message stretched across their sides: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” It was the high tide of New Atheism—Richard Dawkins filling stadiums, and the cultural mood tilting hard against faith. Belief in God felt not only outdated but unfashionable. But something unexpected happened.

In a small radio studio near Westminster Abbey, a young broadcaster named Justin Brierley started inviting atheists and Christians to have honest conversations. No shouting. No mocking. Just listening, questioning, and seeking understanding. At the time, critics warned him:
“You’re giving atheism a platform! Christians will lose their faith!”

Atheists started listening, and some—even very public ones—began to reconsider. Scroll through YouTube comments today under Brierley’s debates with people like Richard Dawkins, and you’ll see an astonishing pattern. Atheists writing things like: “I don’t believe in God, but this conversation made me think.” “This is the first Christian space where I’ve felt respected.” “I’m an atheist… but I’m curious again.”

One journalist calls it a “softening.” A growing number of public intellectuals have begun speaking publicly about Christianity as morally beautiful, culturally essential, and spiritually compelling.

Brierley calls it a “surprising rebirth of belief in God.” Many people—especially young men—are quietly asking again: “What if there is more?” Sometimes God moves by opening cracks in even the most confident doubt.

E.R. Nurses is the 2021 book of over 100 personal stories of E.R. nurses all over the United States. Victoria Lindsay served in the US Navy as a gunner’s mate for several years before she left and decided to become a nurse. She began working with heart-transplant patients and now specializes in cardiothoracic surgery nursing.

Lindsay gives a first-person account of a special incident with Ken, a patient, who she is prepping for a heart transplant. She advises him he now needs a serious change in lifestyle:

“‘Whatever you were doing before, you need to really come at it from different points and change. You need to be able to eat healthy and exercise to the best of your ability.’

“Ken nods in agreement, but he doesn’t know what I do.

“Not everyone who gets a new heart actually takes care of it. I’ve seen heart transplants ruined pretty quickly over a few years because patients didn’t control their diabetes. They end up basically throwing the whole … heart away.

“I’ve had heart-transplant patients come back in and say: ‘You know what? I’m just not going to take my immuno-suppression medication anymore.’

“And I say: ‘You do realize someone died for you, right? That this heart you’ve got could have gone to anyone a little bit healthier or younger – someone who could have done something more with their life. But it was given to you, and now you don’t want to take your … drugs?'”

As of the book’s publishing in 2021, Ken has followed her advice. Not everyone does. In the same way, some believers and non-believers alike adopt a callous and ungrateful attitude toward a certain Someone who died for them and offered them a new Life.

Sixty years ago, when Charles Schulz (“Sparky” to his friends) and his small creative team first brought the Peanuts gang to life on television, executives thought the project was doomed. Everything about it seemed wrong for network TV. The pacing was slow. The voice actors were children instead of professionals. And worst of all—in the eyes of executives—Schulz insisted that Linus stand onstage and recite the nativity story straight from the Gospel of Luke.

One executive flatly said that including Scripture in a Christmas special was too religious, too risky. But the air date had already been set, so CBS reluctantly agreed to broadcast it—once. They didn’t expect to do it again.

Then came December 9, 1965. Fifteen million people tuned in. And everything the executives had criticized—the simplicity, the sincerity, the Scripture—became everything viewers loved. The next morning’s reviews were glowing. Families had gathered around their televisions and heard, perhaps for the first time on primetime TV, the angels’ announcement: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

The special became a classic not because it followed the trends, but because it gently pointed back to something deeper than commercialism or sentimentality. Schulz once told his colleagues, “If we don’t tell the story, who will?”

This little, unlikely cartoon dared to tell the Bible’s story of Christmas. And decades later, the world is still listening.