Sermon illustrations

Perseverance & suffering — illustrations by passage

Matched to the text you're preaching. Each illustration below is keyed to a passage on endurance and suffering, and drawn from someone who actually endured — and wrote it down.

Hebrews 12:1–2

“Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus.”

Run with endurance — Perpetua

A young mother imprisoned in Roman Carthage, Perpetua refused her own father's repeated pleas to save herself by recanting. She went to her death steadfast — and her endurance so moved her jailer, Pudens, that he became a believer. The witness that finishes the race can convert the one holding the keys.

From The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity by Vibia Perpetua (203) — read the account →

Lamentations 3:22–23

“His mercies … are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

His mercies are new every morning — Mary Rowlandson

Seized in King Philip's War and held for eleven weeks of forced marches, having lost her wounded child, Mary Rowlandson clung to a single Bible given to her in captivity and read her ordeal through it day by day. Her account is a study in finding fresh mercy in the worst week imaginable.

From A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson by Mary Rowlandson (1682) — read the account →

James 1:2–4

“The testing of your faith produces steadfastness.”

Tested faith that endures — Mary Prince

Born into slavery in Bermuda, sold and separated from everyone she loved, Mary Prince found faith among the Moravians and held it through brutal labour until she reached freedom in England — and then testified, becoming the first black woman to publish an account of slavery in Britain. Faith tested to the limit, and still standing.

From The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself by Mary Prince (1831) — read the account →

Genesis 50:20

“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”

Meant for evil, used for good — Samuel Crowther

Slave raiders tore Samuel Crowther from his Yoruba home as a boy and sold him toward a slave ship. The very evil done to him — carried away by sea — became the road to a Royal Navy rescue, a Sierra Leone schoolroom, baptism in 1825, and ultimately his consecration in 1864 as the first African bishop of the Anglican Church. Then he sailed back up the rivers of his homeland to bring the gospel to his own people. Few lives show so plainly that what was meant to destroy a man can be the very thing God uses to save many.

From Journal of an Expedition up the Niger and Tshadda Rivers by Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1855) — read the account →

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