Preaching 50 Great Bible Chapters

By Tim Bahula @ http://www.bahula.ca/tim/2006/12/preaching_50_great_bible_chapters.php

At the end of November, Wayne over at ekklesia asked what 50 Chapters in the Bible I would preach if I only had one year left to preach and could only focus on one chapter each week… okay, he didn’t put it quite like that. Since I blogged that I had started my list and Wayne picked up on that, I figured I better come clean. After all a New Year is about to dawn.

The task turned out to be a little more challenging that I anticipated. There are 1,189 chapters in the Bible; selecting 50 great chapters means that 1,139 need to go unpreached. That means I’m selecting 1 in 20 chapters. Some choices are pretty obvious. After all not many preachers are going to take up preaching 1 Chronicles 4… wait, that’s the “prayer of Jabez”… make that 1 Chronicles 3. On the other hand, I would expect that most preachers would take a chapter like Ephesians 1.

BTW, this type of preaching series is not new. Spurgeon had his commentary on Great Chapters of the Bible. For that work, Spurgeon included 31 great chapters. You can see the table of contents on the Amazon site. Kyle Yates published a book in 1957 Preaching from Great Bible Chapters, but I can’t find many details on that work. G. Campbell Morgan did 49 chapters in Great Chapters of the Bible. I guess that he must have had an extra week of vacation?! I assumed that vacation is why Wayne asked for 50 and not 52.

Without further ado, here’s my list in the order in which I wrote them down.

1. Exodus 20
2. 1 Corinthians 15
3. John 1
4. Luke 2
5. Isaiah 53
6. Jeremiah 31
7. Psalm 119
8. Psalm 133
9. Psalm 1
10. Genesis 1
    —
11. Genesis 3
12. Lamentations 3
13. Ephesians 1
14. Galatians 5
15. 2 Corinthians 3
16. 1 Thessalonians 1
17. Matthew 13
18. Acts 10
19. Ezekiel 8
20. Hebrews 11
    —
21. Revelation 1
22. Romans 8
23. Deuteronomy 6
24. 1 Peter 1
25. Numbers 14
26. Joshua 1
27. 2 Peter 3
28. 1 Samuel 25
29. 2 Samuel 7
30. Romans 3
    —
31. Philippians 2
32. Colossians 1
33. John 11
34. Mark 8
35. Matthew 5
36. Luke 23
37. Daniel 3
38. 1 Timothy 3
39. 2 Timothy 2
40. Ezra 8
    —
41. 1 John 5
42. Judges 18
43. John 19
44. Proverbs 8
45. James 3
46. Joshua 14
47. Luke 15
48. Revelation 22
49. 2 Chronicles 24
50. Job 1