Welcome to a special edition of Truth for Life with Alistair Begg and Bob Lapine.

If you listen every Sunday, don't worry, you can still hear the regularly scheduled program from our study in Lessons for Life.

Wherever you listen, just look for the program that was posted on Saturday, September 16th, it's titled Approved by God.

Maybe you've already seen it or heard about it, but Alistair just released a new book titled The Christian Manifesto, Jesus' Life Changing Words from the Sermon on the Plane.

I had the opportunity recently to sit down with Alistair and talk about this well-known passage from Luke chapter 6 and the book that it inspired.

Here's our conversation.

I want to start by asking you about the title of the book because I don't think of you as a provocateur,

and yet here we are in the middle of conversations about things like Christian nationalism and Alistair Begg writes a book called The Christian Manifesto.

You want to explain yourself here?

Yeah, I think that the title we thought about for those very reasons and decided that the risk was worth the potential benefit.

Just in the sense that people are used to setting out their declarations, their statements regarding their company policy or their school agenda or whatever it might be.

So what we're really saying in this is that if you listen to the king talk about his kingdom, what are the principles and values that are there?

And so Jesus in a couple of places, we might say the Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon on the Plane actually sets out these principles.

So that's what it's about, but it's not.

I think the provocative aspect of it is hopefully we'll make people say, wait a minute, what do you mean a Manifesto?

And then they'll read it rather than, oh dear, I don't want to hear a Manifesto and they'll think like it.

Time will tell.

You mentioned both the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plane. There's overlap between what we see in Matthew's Gospel and what's in Luke's Gospel.

This is really the heart of what Jesus is telling his disciples that life is supposed to be all about, right?

Yes, I think it's pretty clear that there are two separate occasions for sure, but that the overlap between the material is exactly what we would expect when two of Jesus followers were giving to their readers in their Gospel, the sort of highlights of the overarching teaching of the king.

And a bit like in newspaper articles, somebody highlights one piece, but when you read both of them, you realize that they are fitting in with one another.

And as we think about this, I'm thinking back to the first Sermon I ever preached when I was in my 20s, which was on the Beatitudes.

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