Jump directly to the Content
Jump directly to the Content

Sermon Illustrations

Home > Sermon Illustrations

Lost Your Faith or Had None to Begin With?

Ian Leitch writes in Life Before Death! A Restored, Regenerated, and Renewed Life:

A businessman asked me if I would speak to his staff, and I readily accepted. One of his staff asked me if we could talk privately. She said, "Ian, when I was 22, I was in a serious car accident, and my boyfriend was killed. I have gone through a lot of surgery and am now doing well. When that happened, I lost my faith."

What do you say to someone like that? Well, I prayed and I said, as kindly as I could, "You know, when they built the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, and the QE2, they did not test them in dry dock. They didn't leave them in dry dock and get big hoses on them to see if they would leak. They got those ships out into the open ocean to put them through sea trials. These trials were not intended to sink the ship. These trials were to prove that the ship was seaworthy. The only way you can know whether your faith is real or not is when the pressures of life come, when you go through trials. Then you know if you are seaworthy or not. Can I ask you honestly, did you lose your faith or did you find you had none?"

She said, "Ian, I guess you are right, I had none."

Related Sermon Illustrations

The Necessity of Adversity

In an on-line article for Leadership journal, John Ortberg discusses how adverse situations are necessary for our spiritual growth. He writes:

Psychologist Jonathon Haidt had a hypothetical ...
[Read More]

Spiritual Enlightenment Through Profound Darkness

Can you imagine what it would be like to lose three generations of your family in one blinding moment? How would you survive? That happened in 1991 to Jerry Sittser, a professor at ...

[Read More]