Sermon Illustrations

As an Indian, Manoj Raithatha was raised as a Hindu and his family regularly visited the Hare Krishna temple. But an economic downturn resulted in the family moving start a new life in Kenya. In Nairobi his parents enrolled Manoj and his sister in a Christian school.

Manoj writes, “I was intrigued by the teaching that God took upon himself the judgment of our sin by dying on a cross. But seeing my inventive mother baking cakes to make ends meet diverted my attention from God to money. I wanted success and recognition, and I wanted money!

Manoj became very successful buying property and reselling it at a profit. He said, “Before I knew it, I was buying whole blocks of apartments across the UK.” But then the economic downturn of 2008 was brutal and the value of his business disappeared overnight.

Then came the ultimate crisis, his 2-year-old son became critically ill with severe breathing difficulties. In the ER his airways shut, and he was intubated to keep him alive. Manoj and his wife wept uncontrollably.

Then Manoj said, “An American couple whom we had recently befriended began praying for Ishaan. They even got their families’ churches in the United States to pray for him. On the fourth day in the hospital, the doctor said that my son would not open his eyes anytime soon. But then Ishaan suddenly sat bolt upright in bed. The only explanation was that we had witnessed a miracle.”

Manoj and his wife committed to attend their friends’ church to thank them for the prayers. Manoj said:

I felt stirred to walk down to the front and to give his life to Jesus, the One who gave his life for me. I couldn’t get my head around the immensity of God’s grace. After I gave my life to Christ, my wife didn’t recognize me; she felt like she was married to a new man. I found myself saying sorry, becoming gentler and caring for others, laying aside the pursuit of money in order to serve God.

Pastor and author Esau McCauley tells the following story about learning to forgive:

Growing up, I had good reason to loathe my father. He was abusive and struggled with addiction. He cycled in and out of jail, and that sent my family tumbling down the economic ladder.

Before he died when I was in my mid-30s, I realized that my sense of my own righteousness had callused into something cruel. I didn’t want him to change, because his poor behavior formed a central part of my identity. He left his family; I built one. He was addicted to drugs; I barely drank alcohol. As long as I compared myself with him in this way, I needed his brokenness to provide direction. I was not running toward the good; I was fleeing him.

I remember the day that my father apologized to me. We hadn’t spoken in years but were now reunited at my sister’s wedding. During a lull in the rehearsal, I asked him the questions that had been with me my whole life: “Why did you leave, and why did you stay away?” He replied, “Son, I don’t rightly know. After I left, I saw that you all were doing better without me, so I stayed away. I’m sorry.”

What shocked me most was how difficult it was to accept this new version of him even as he tried to make amends. Who was I if I wasn’t a person with a wicked father? I was confronted with a miracle that I was not sure I wanted. Forgiving my father forced me to create a positive, and not merely a reactive, vision of my life. It also taught the valuable lesson that not all lost causes are irredeemably lost.

Chloé Zhao is a distinguished 43-year-old (as of 2026) film director with five feature films under her belt. Her film Hamnet won the Golden Globe for best motion-picture, drama, and received eight Academy Award nominations, including for best picture and best director.

In a recent interview she was asked about her views of death. Zhao replied:

I have been terrified of death my whole life. I still am. And because I’ve been so afraid I haven’t been able to live fully. I haven’t been able to love with my heart open because I’m so scared of losing love, which is a form of death. When you’re in your 40s, a midlife crisis is the best thing that can happen to you, because you’re on your way to a rebirth. You can’t run from this feeling. Your body is changing, and you can feel death. And because I’m so scared of it, I have no choice but to start to develop a healthier relationship with it, or the second half of life would be too hard. It shouldn’t be this terrifying that I can’t even live.

Anthony Hopkins is known for playing characters with hidden depths—Hannibal Lecter, the butler in The Remains of the Day—men who keep most of what they feel buried beneath the surface. For a long time, that was Hopkins himself.

In his memoir and a recent interview, he describes a night that changed everything: December 29, 1975, at 11 p.m. He was drunk, in a blackout, driving his car somewhere in California, with no idea where he was going. Suddenly, he realized he could easily kill someone. He pulled over, went into a Beverly Hills party, found an ex-agent and said, “I need help.”

And then, he says, something happened. He looked at his watch—11 o’clock—and, as he tells it, a voice spoke to him from deep inside: “It’s all over. Now you can start living. And it has all been for a purpose, so don’t forget one moment of it.” He calls it “spooky”—a male, reasonable voice, like a radio in his soul. From that moment, he says, the craving to drink was taken from him.

At 87 he looks back—from a bullied, lonely boy called “Dennis the Dunce,” to a man nearly destroyed by alcohol, to an actor with a long, rich life—he hears a pattern: “Everything I sought and yearned for found me. I didn’t find it. It came to me.”

The article doesn’t say if Hopkins has accepted Christ, but he’s getting close–or maybe God is moving close to him.

The Christian astrophysicist Deborah Haarsma was standing alone in the New Mexico desert beside the Very Large Array, a vast field of twenty-seven radio dishes stretching for miles. While her colleagues worked inside the control room, tracking signals arriving from halfway across the universe, she stood outside in the cold, looking up with her bare eyes. The sky was thick with stars, and the words of Psalm 19 came to mind: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” The team was studying gravitational lenses—places where massive galaxies bend space itself. In moments like that, ordinary measurements felt useless.

As a young researcher, Haarsma found familiar atheist arguments surfacing in her mind. Carl Sagan once wrote that we live on “an insignificant planet of a humdrum star…tucked away in some forgotten corner” of the cosmos. If the universe is this vast, where do human beings fit? And where does God?

Astronomers estimate that our galaxy contains about 100 billion stars, with hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond it. Even more striking, everything we can see—stars, planets, atoms—accounts for only about 5 percent of the universe. The remaining 95 percent is dark matter and dark energy, real and powerful yet largely unexplained. Some conclude that that God must be distant and impersonal.

But Scripture proclaims that the Creator of all things did not remain removed from what he made. In a universe vast beyond imagination, the incarnation declares something astonishing: the God who made the cosmos chose to come flesh and dwell among us.

Hip-hop artist Tedashii grew up believing he was a good kid who never got into trouble. He received a scholarship to Baylor University, where he joined the football and track teams and excelled academically. “I’m living my dream,” he recalled.

Halfway through his first semester, a student walked up to him. He said, ‘I heard the way you speak about girls, how you talk about your life. I heard the jokes you told and how you interact with other guys. And I gotta be honest, I think the Bible would call that sin.’ Tedashii yelled, shoving the student away. For the first time, someone told him he wasn’t good, and it was God saying it.

Later, Tedashii attempted to break a weightlifting record but injured his back. Doctors warned that further injury could leave him paralyzed. He chose to prioritize his ability to walk over football. Two days later, the same student shared the gospel with him again, explaining that Jesus died for his sins and offered a relationship with God. He said that, even though Tedashii was an enemy of God, Jesus came to this world and lived the perfect life that he couldn’t live. He died innocently on the cross, dying the death that he should have died. Three days later, God raised his Son from the dead, proving that Jesus is God. He said, “God doesn’t want your good behavior, he wants a relationship.”

This message shook Tedashii. Later that week, he broke down in his dorm room, realizing he wasn’t good in God’s eyes. He cried out to God, believing the gospel for the first time. The student who shared the gospel with him became a close friend and encouraged him to include Christian messages in his rap lyrics. After Baylor, Tedashii signed with Reach Records and released four solo albums. The gospel’s transformation of his life compelled him to share its message with others.

In 2012, an elderly woman named Cecilia Giménez noticed that a beloved fresco of Jesus in her small Spanish church was flaking and fading. The painting—Ecce Homo, “Behold the Man”—showed Christ crowned with thorns, on his way to the cross. Cecilia loved that image of Jesus. And so, with good intentions and very limited skill, she decided to help by restoring it herself.

What emerged was not a careful restoration but a face so misshapen that the internet exploded with mockery. The image went viral. People laughed. Memes spread. Cecilia, already in her 80s, was humiliated. She wept. She stopped eating. She was described in headlines as a “crazy old woman” who had ruined a priceless work of art.

By every human measure, it was a failure—a public flop. And yet, something unexpected happened. Tourists began showing up. First dozens. Then thousands. Then more than 150,000 visitors from around the world. The struggling town of Borja came back to life. Restaurants survived. Museums flourished. An opera was written. The church became a place of pilgrimage. And Cecilia—once scorned—became a beloved figure.

The painting she botched was called Behold the Man—a picture of Jesus on the way to being mocked, beaten, and humiliated. The Christ who knows what it is to be laughed at. The Christ who turns shame into redemption.Cecilia didn’t plan any of this. But Jesus took her mistake and folded it into a larger story of mercy and life.

Preaching Angle: The gospel does not promise that failure does not get the final word. In the hands of Jesus, even our worst missteps can be made to serve his good purposes.

After 23 years as an NFL sideline reporter, Laura Okmin made an unusual career change. Instead of asking coaches questions on game day, she now helps them confront something far more difficult: their blind spots.

The work began after Dan Quinn was fired as head coach of the Atlanta Falcons. Quinn wanted to understand what went wrong, so he planned to call former players and staff himself. Okmin stopped him and suggested something different. What if she interviewed dozens of people who had worked with him — anonymously — and asked not about strategy, but about what he missed as a person?

Quinn agreed. “All of us have blind spots,” he said.

Okmin spent months interviewing players, assistants, and even family members. She compiled the feedback into a long report that revealed patterns Quinn could not see on his own. He took on too much. He overlooked his staff. He worked harder but with diminishing results. The feedback was painful — and transformative. Quinn memorized the document and later recommended the process to other coaches.

Since then, Okmin has done this work with more than ten NFL coaches. Many struggle at first. The anonymity is uncomfortable. The criticism can sting. Okmin herself admits she would not want one done on her. But the coaches who endure it often respond the same way. After reading hard feedback, one coach simply said, “That’s fair.”

Preaching Angle:

We all have blind spots, and we need the Word of God and good Christian friends to help us confess and see what we’ve been missing.

A sheriff’s corporal in St. Johns County, Florida, responded to what sounded like a routine call: an animal loose on a county road. After 25 years on the job, he had handled horses, cows, pigs, goats, even turkeys. This one, he assumed, would be no different. The animal was an emu.

The corporal admitted he underestimated the situation. Agricultural deputies usually handle escaped livestock, but they were unavailable. “I figured I can handle something like this oversized turkey,” he said. Instead, he found himself in a 45-minute chase with a bird named Tina.

Body-camera footage shows the emu calmly strolling down the road as the corporal tries to coax her closer. At first, his voice is upbeat. As the minutes pass, his sighs grow heavier. When he finally gets his hands on Tina, she breaks free and runs again. Emus can’t fly, but they are fast, powerful, and capable of serious damage with their legs. Tina tore holes in his uniform and forced him to improvise.

Eventually, the corporal put handcuffs on the emu’s legs to stop her from kicking. Only when Tina’s owner arrived did the chase end. The bird immediately calmed down, accepted food, and became gentle again.

The corporal later reflected that he thought he knew what he was dealing with, but all his experience had not prepared him for and emu chase.

Preaching Angles:

So many things in the Christian life–serving, discipleship, obedience, loving others–are like chasing an emu. They are way more challenging than we ever imagined.

A New York Times article observes how we are seeing AI as God. As the subtitle puts it, “A religious fervor surrounds our relationship with technology.” The linguist Adam Aleksic claims, “You’re Literally Worshiping Your Phone… Scrolling [on your computer or phone] is a digital prayer. You assume it knows a piece of you. You are offering your attention and in exchange you get something.”

But the New York Times article offered this insightful contrast between the God of the Bible and the idol god of AI:

“As anyone who has ever prayed in a house of worship or to God in bed at night will know, prayers are not always answered. But the act itself gives comfort and hope. Here lies an important difference between our “digital prayers,” which is a guaranteed transaction, and traditional religious prayer.

The chatbot prayer is always met immediately with an answer. And the answer comes from an unctuous prophet: An analysis published this year found that A.I. chatbots are 50 percent more [bent on meeting your needs].. The major chatbots flatter their users and reflect back to them their worldview. The A.I.-driven personalization algorithm creates playlists for you and only you… The relationship between users and chatbots is defined by ‘narcissistic individualism,’ with A.I. incapable of delivering the hard truths of a traditional prophet or oracle.”

The article notes that the god of AI shapes us to think: “I am the only one who gets to initiate the conversation. It is there for me, and it serves me.”