Bible teacher Herbert Lockyer presents biographical sketches of eleven men and women in a manner that provides both inspiration from their achievements and caution from their failures:

• Enoch
• Lot
• Rachel
• Elijah
• Saul
• David and Jonathan
• Asa
• Herod
• Barnabas
• Timothy

He wrote, “Here are men and women of like passions as ourselves, and they appeal to the imagination of the average person today because of a similarity of experience. Like these ancient characters, we triumph by faith, as some of them did, or fail through disobedience and unbelief, as others did.…The lives of men and women of old may be a continual inspiration or warning to us in these modern times.”