hey everyone, welcome to episode 16 of hello church. I am Justin Trapp. I'm Wade Bearden, and we're going to be talking about sermon illustrations today. You know, we ran this poll with our users, and we asked them, Hey, what do you need help with the most on a weekly basis as it relates to your message? And it was overwhelmingly skewed in the illustration department. People said, I need sermon illustration help. And it's interesting because if you google free sermon illustrations or sermon illustrations, you can find 10 websites immediately that have lots of sermon illustrations. It just seems like the illustrations are old, or the sites aren't updated, or if I'm being honest, they're kind of cheesy. Yeah, well, you have to have dial-up to get into some of those websites, DSLs on the phone, and yeah, because there's this propensity to kind of put a bunch out there, and if you don't constantly update it, then you have stories from

you know 1999 and everybody's like, Well, who is that person that you're talking about? And so, it can be difficult. I can go to a commentary set. So, if I'm studying Luke chapter five, I can go to a commentary, and I know, Okay, there are all these commentaries. I go to Luke 5. Here's my research. When it comes to an illustration for Luke 5, where do I go? There's really no place to go unless maybe a commentary set has illustrations. So, that's what makes illustrations and findings, sermon illustrations, just a different beast than normal research, yeah. And so, what we're going to be talking about today is four places to find engaging, right, engaging, fresh illustrations for your sermons. And let's start with number one. The first place is illustrations.bible. It's a website that we actually started about two years ago, and we post a new sermon illustration every single day, yeah. And it's different. So, some of them are clips from movies that you can look up.

some of them are news stories, some of them are podcast episodes, things that we hope are fresh for our listeners. And two, you can get sermon illustrations from Bible books. We don't post a lot of illustrations from Christian books; we try to find them in the news, we try to find them on television, we want them to be fresh, something that your people can relate to. Because if you think about Jesus and parables, he used what people understood in their time period. So, we get a lot of parables about farming, and this is an agrarian society, and shepherding. So, that's what we try to do with the website. Yeah, it's a great website. Again, we put every single day, Monday through Friday, so check it out, illustrations.bible. And these are all illustrations that have been created or found or curated or written within the past two years, so everything's really fresh. Yeah, and we also have illustrations that we include on ministrypass.com. There are a couple of different ways that you can access those. You can go on

the site and just search our database, and you can find some illustrations if you're a member. Also, within our sermon series guide, so if you're preaching on faithfulness each week in our sermon series guide where it talks about faithfulness, there are two to three sermon illustrations per week, so you don't even have to go searching for that if you're using our guide. It's just right there. Uh, number two, a great place to find engaging illustrations are your relationships, your personal relationships, maybe with your spouse, with your kids. I mean, that right there is a well of goodness. Well, here's the thing: good relationships, they help us to become better people, right? So, good relationships, yeah, if you are a parent, uh, your relationship with your kids will hopefully help you become more caring and selfless. I feel like whenever you become a parent, you just get the selfishness kind of beat out of you by force. You are, you're forced to care. Same thing with marriage. Your life, you're not, your life changes. Now, how you go about sharing

those um you do that at your own discretion. I knew I've known a number of people. They grew up in a pastor's home, and their father would give them money every time they told a story about them, and they would get their approval first. So, I thought that was kind of cool. Yeah, because instead of a kid coming out of children's church and everybody's kind of laughing at them because they told an embarrassing story, they knew what to expect. They approved it, and then they also got a little bit of cash. Yeah, I think um your life is colorful, right? And life is adventurous, and there is heartbreak, there are setbacks, and all of those moments, if you have a way to catalog those or to remember those, they can be great, great lessons and illustrations for you to illustrate the passage you're working on, you know um you know like Wade said, you know if you have a funny moment with your kids or maybe it's a you know lesson that you and your spouse learned early on in marriage that may

help other couples early in their marriage. This is gonna be a great way for you to illustrate the text and, um, you know, make it engaging. Yeah, and here's a way to record those. If you're into journaling, you could even add a section in your journal, and you could say emotional moment, funny moment, and sad moment, whatever you want to do. And then just every day, write down a funny moment, um, that you experience. Maybe you got chased. We have an armadillo in our yard here. Maybe he got chased by an armadillo. We're certain he has leprosy. We don't know. You almost stepped on a large snake at our office. So just, if you write down, and that's a sermon right there. That's a, that's a not just illustration, a sermon, Sherman. Um, and you just, if you write that down every day, like funny moment, it doesn't have to be toward a particular message, but as you're preparing, you can kind of just

skim through and you're like, Oh, okay, you know, that's a cool one. It's a good way to record those moments. Yeah, and so number three, your sort of nice segue into that is your humorous moments in your life or your failures. These can become great sermon illustrations. I had one illustration I used when I was a youth pastor where I was driving in my neighborhood. I saw the squirrel on the ground. He obviously had been hurt by some sort of vehicle, but he was still alive. He was kind of moving slowly. So I get out, and in a moment of bravery, right, I tried to rescue him because I saw the animal control vehicle like a few blocks, okay, you know, earlier. And so I was like, I'm gonna go take the squirrel to the animal control. And so I'm like, Oh, you poor little guy. I'm talking to him like he's like a little puppy or something, and his nose is bleeding, you know, and

he's got mouth blood on his mouth, and I'm so I take off my over shirt. I wrap him up, and I know this bravery, right? I literally get in my car, y'all, with a squirrel, and I drive. I'm driving, holding one hand, uh, I'm holding this squirrel and like wrapped up like in the, like in a swaddling cough, uh, cloth, my shirt, and one hand on the steering wheel, and I drive back to the animal control. And I get out, and I mean, it's just a miracle, right, that the squirrel didn't go berserk. And, uh, I go to hand the squirrel to the animal control, and he must have known who she was, right? Because as soon as I reached him to, I'm not going back, yeah, that's exactly what happened. He literally just jumped out of my arms and started attacking me. And I had a watch on at the time, and he's literally trying to bite my watch, holding onto my arm, and I'm like swinging my arm around. It was very traumatic, right? And then she

like grabbed her little noose thing, and then I felt bad again because he was rough on him. I don't know if he made it back. You know what? I don't even remember what the illustration was, but my student ministry, they just ate it. Oh, they thought it was so funny. Yeah, they would bring up that story to me for months on it. Hey, Pastor Jesse, you remember that one time you got in the car with the squirrel? You know those kind of moments, man. Those are amazing sermon illustration modes. Yes, so one illustration I used not too long ago. It was when you and I, we went to a conference in Anaheim, California, and we ended up staying at the Disneyland Resort because it was on the property. Yeah, and so we're there, and we're hanging out, and you can, from there, you can just kind of walk to Disneyland, and we're like, Oh, this is kind of fun. And it was just you and I, and it was Valentine's Day.

our lives will never forget. Yeah, yeah, our wives are at home spending Valentine's Day together at Disneyland, hanging out. And so we're on property, and we go to the conference, and we go out to eat, and it's like I think 7:30. We're on West Coast time, so we already have called our wives, told them goodnight, Hey, you know, hope you had a good Valentine's Day, you know, yeah, we'll make it up. And then we go to this downtown Disney area, and there's the monorail, and you're like, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if they just hop on and just kind of ride around? That'd be awesome. So we go up, and I asked the person at the counter, I was like, Hey, do you have to have a ticket to get on the monorail? Because we didn't know if the monorail went into the park or not. We just thought maybe it just, we had no idea. We just saw it moving.

around it looked cool and the woman at the counter was like yeah yeah you have to have a ticket and she looked down at our badges and she was like are y'all here for a convention and we're like yeah and she's like go go go now and she opened up the game go go go go go go she's like looking around like like special ops or something and so we just went up the stairs and we went to the monorail deck and and I remember Justin's like what are we doing I was like I don't know man just go with it and we just we hopped on and it's taking us and there was this moment where we realized that this wasn't a transportation ride as much as it was an attraction yeah and it was leading us to the park and I we I saw this couple I was like hey where are y'all headed and they're like oh we're going to Disneyland and I'm like they're like where y'all

headed and I was like, I'm going to Disneyland too. Yeah, yes, we. And it dropped us off, and we got Tomorrowland, right, right in Tomorrowland. And we got out, and we had like an hour where we just, we roamed Disneyland, of course, free. Of course, I got a screenshot from my wife. My wife sent me a text and a screenshot of my location. She said, I hope you're having fun Valentine's Day Disneyland. Got 'em. And I used the illustration of like the idea. Everybody's like, Oh, that's so crazy. The idea of doing that for free and the idea of two. It's hard for us to believe that free, free things actually exist. And talking about God's grace. So, use those and just mark those down as you go through. And then we mentioned failures. It is a pet peeve of mine, Justin, when preachers always make themselves out to be the hero. Oh yeah, it's just, it is. I hate it. They're always the one making the right

decisions follow me as I follow Jesus. They're always the enlightened one, and I think people grow by you talking about, Hey, here's how I kind of failed the other day, and I didn't live this out, and here's what I can do better next time. So, be open about those things, share the funny moments. I think it breaks up the monotony of a message, and also share your failures. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And then fourth on our list, a great place to find engaging sermon illustrations is really current events. Yeah, there's a lot happening in our world, a lot of terrible things, a lot of wonderful things, and it's really great. Sometimes you can talk about something that's happening like this week in the news, but sometimes, you know, you can just lean back on something that has happened recently that provides a good illustration or a good example of what you're talking about. Yeah, and I had somebody ask me, they say, How do you collect those illustrations? I have this bookmark folder on my web

browser that's just called illustrations. Anytime I run across an article, you know in your mind, you're like, Oh, I could use that, but if you don't mark it, it's really going to kind of disappear. So, I would put a folder on your browser and name it Illustrations and just add a favorite bookmark to everything that you come across: funny news stories, funny YouTube videos. And also, when I'm reading books too, I have different colored tabs, you know those little peel-off tabs you can get a pack of those. And maybe you say, Okay, blue is sermon illustrations. And when you're reading a book, you just put that blue one down whenever you come across something. Or you're watching a movie, you just open up a folder on your phone and write it down and maybe put a topic name beside it so that when you're searching, it makes it a little bit easier. I think it's so important to kind of always be paying attention. It's really

important to do that. Talk to your people. Get out and talk to the people around you. What are they working through? And that's going to help you collect sermon illustrations. Yeah, so those are four ways. I'm sure there are more. If you have another idea on a place that you find engaging sermon illustrations, please share it in the comments below. I'm sure everyone watching the video and looking at the comments would appreciate your input and help to the community. You know, our podcast is growing a lot. Its subscriber base keeps continuing to grow every single week. Our views keep continuing to grow. We appreciate that. Thank you so much. If you haven't subscribed, please do so. Subscribe if you're watching us on YouTube. You can see, you can get notifications when we release a new episode. Or if you listen on podcasts, wherever you listen to a podcast, Spotify, Apple, iTunes, whatever the case may be, subscribe. Leave us a five-star review. I mean, I'm not gonna ask for a four-star

review. I'm definitely asking for a five-star review, uh, but in the very least, um, subscribe so that you get those notifications as well. Yeah, we are really excited about the topics we've covered so far and what's coming up in the future. Next episode, we're going to be talking about the five skills needed to create a compelling sermon series. So, if you're thinking about maybe upping the game on your sermon series, hopefully next week will be a really good opportunity for you to learn to grow. That's our next episode, episode 17 of Hello Church. This was episode 16. Once again, thank you for tuning in, and if you know someone who is a pastor who could use this episode, maybe they've been kind of struggling to get some sermon illustrations, make sure to share this with them. I think it'll be a huge help. We'll see you next time.

4 Best Places to Find Engaging Sermon Illustrations | Hello Church!

Scripts