Sermon Illustrations

Among the paintings at a Vermeer exhibit in London was one by Van Ostade that belongs to Queen Elizabeth II. It's a painting of the interior of a peasant's cottage. Imagine! The Queen in the splendor of Buckingham Palace sits and looks at a painting of a peasant's cottage! Maybe we all wonder how the "other half" of the...

When Joel Achenbach wrote his fascinating book Why Things Are he whimsically added a subtitle: "Answers to Every Essential Question in Life." The sub-title was, of course, written in jest. The book answers such essential questions as "Why Are Yawns Contagious?" "Why Doesn't Air Fall to the Ground?" and "Why Do Foreign...

The cockatrice was a legendary monster hatched from a cock's egg by a toad or serpent. It could kill its victims with a glance. It was finally destroyed by a man in a coat of glass. The cockatrice saw himself reflected in the glass and so died. The poet Robert Burns longed for us to see ourselves as others see us. It is far more...

Winkelbury Camp is an Iron Age hill fort in Wiltshire, England. According to legend, if you march around it at midnight cursing all the time you can summon the Devil who will appear on a black horse and grant one wish. Of course, that's a foolish superstition. In the first place you cannot summon Satan to come to you. In the...

Dick Bass and Frank Wells became the first persons to climb the tallest mountain on each continent. They wrote a book about their adventures called "Seven Summits." Now Bass has written another book called "The Eighth Summit." It's a book about the figurative mountain every person has to climb in his or her own...

When the great Church of Holy Wisdom (the Hagia Sophia) was completed in Constantinople they hung thousands of lamps in it. The lights shone through a corona of windows in the dome, so that a sailor on the Bosporus could find his direction not only by the stars but by the light from the church. One writer of the time said, "It...

A couple in Milwaukee asked an appraiser to look at a painting in their home. While there he saw another, which they thought to be a copy or reproduction of a work by Van Gogh. It turned out to be an original Van Gogh -- Still Life with Flowers painted in 1886! It later sold at auction for $1,400,000. What is there in your home...

When Mahatma Gandhi died he left an estate valued at less than three dollars! But he left a legacy of peace and non-violent political activism that inspired many who came after him. The estate of Jesus Christ was even less. Apparently all He had was his robe and His executioners got that. But He spoke of His legacy "Peace I...

Dorothy Sayers wrote, "It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear that story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all." Recently in one community in the mid-South an animal rights activist wrote an indignant letter to the...

In the early days of the twentieth century there was a bank robber in the West called Black Bart. He was so successful that he threatened to bankrupt the Wells-Fargo Company. The problem was solved when the company gave Black Bart a pension on the condition that he retire and stay off the highways. But we ...