True, sourced stories for sermons and lessons. Search by keyword, theme, or Bible book.
195 illustrations found
Emperor Penguins Take Turns in the Cold
Emperor penguins live through the Antarctic winter on the open ice, where wind chills can drop to 76 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. They survive by working together.
Endurance Found After 107 Years
In 1915, Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was squeezed and crushed by Antarctic sea ice and sank, leaving his men stranded on the ice. Shackleton led an astonishing escape on foot and in small boats, even sailing a lifeboat across brutal seas to go get help.
Enough at the Opera to Have Carried It
William Wilberforce had spent nine years fighting to end the British slave trade. On March 15, 1796, his bill finally looked like it might pass.
Eric Liddell Wouldn’t Run on Sunday
When Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell learned that the 100 meter heats at the 1924 Paris Olympics would be run on a Sunday, he refused to take part, even though the 100 was his strongest distance, and news of his decision travelled around the world.
Eugenio Monti Lends a Bolt
At the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Italian bobsledder Eugenio Monti was the most dominant driver of his era. During the two-man event, the British team of Tony Nash and Robin Dixon suffered a broken axle bolt on their sled in their first run, and without a replacement they were finished.
Everyone Off the Plane on the Hudson
On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York. About two minutes later it flew into a flock of birds, and both engines lost almost all their power.
Expect Great Things, Attempt Great Things
William Carey was an English shoemaker's apprentice who became convinced that the church should be taking the gospel to the whole world. In 1792 he helped organize a missionary society and preached a sermon with the call, "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God!"
Eyam Shut Itself In
In September 1665, plague arrived in the English village of Eyam in Derbyshire. As it spread, the rector William Mompesson and the former minister Thomas Stanley led the village to do something hard.
Fanny Crosby’s First Face
When Fanny Crosby was only six weeks old, a man posing as a doctor treated an illness by putting hot mustard poultices on her eyes, and the treatment left her blind for life.
Father Kolbe Takes Another Man’s Place
In the summer of 1941, after a prisoner escaped from Auschwitz, the camp leader picked ten men to die by starvation as punishment. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out that he had a wife and children.
Fifteen Whooping Cranes
Whooping cranes are the tallest birds in North America, and there were once more than 10,000 of them. Shooting and the loss of prairie habitat to farming nearly wiped them out.
Fire Ants Hold On to Each Other
When floods hit, fire ants do something amazing. They link together and build a living raft that floats.
Firefighters Save the Dinosaur Trees
The Wollemi pine is so rare that it was thought to be extinct, known only from fossils, until 1994, when a park officer named David Noble rappelled into a narrow canyon in Australia and found trees he didn't recognize.
Fixing Voyager from 15 Billion Miles Away
In November 2023, NASA's Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in existence, started sending home gibberish. Engineers figured out that one memory chip in an onboard computer had failed, taking some of the spacecraft's code with it.
Fleming Noticed the Mold
In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was working in his London lab when he noticed something odd. A mold had accidentally grown on one of his culture plates of staphylococcus bacteria, and around the mold there was a clear circle where the bacteria had died.
Forty Days Lost in the Amazon
On May 1, 2023, a small plane went down in the Colombian Amazon. The mother and two pilots died, but four children, ages 13, 9, 4, and 1, survived the crash and wandered into the jungle looking for help.
Fosbury Flopped Backward to Gold
Before Dick Fosbury, high jumpers went over the bar face down using the straddle or the scissors. As a teenager at Medford High in Oregon, Fosbury worked out a different way.
Frederick Douglass Traded Bread for Lessons
As an enslaved boy in Baltimore, Frederick Douglass had a mistress who started teaching him the alphabet. Then her husband found out and shut it down.
From Bagging Groceries to Super Bowl MVP
Kurt Warner went undrafted out of Northern Iowa. The Green Bay Packers brought him to camp and cut him.
Gail Devers Nearly Lost Her Feet
Around the 1988 Olympics, sprinter Gail Devers was running slowly and getting sicker. She lost weight, lost hair, had headaches and skin sores, and at one point weighed just 79 pounds.