What Comes Before Everything Else

On the convictions that must be settled before any of the arguments begin.

Every argument has a floor beneath it — the things you assume before you say a word. We spend most of our energy arguing the second and third things while quietly skipping the first things, and then we wonder why we never agree. We are not really disagreeing about the surface. We are disagreeing about the foundation, and pretending otherwise.

So let me try to name a few of the first things, the convictions that come before the conclusions. Before we argue about the church’s strategy, we have to settle what the church is for. Before we argue about cultural engagement, we have to settle who is Lord. Before we argue about methods, we have to settle what we believe the gospel actually is. Skip these, and every later argument floats untethered.

The first thing is that God is, and we are not Him. This sounds obvious until you watch how often our anxiety reveals that we have forgotten it. So much of our frantic activity is functional atheism — living as though the outcome depended entirely on us, as though God had stepped out and left us in charge. The first thing humbles us before it does anything else.

The second thing is that we are creatures, made and loved and accountable. Not autonomous, not self-defining, not the authors of our own meaning. This is either unbearable or it is the most liberating thing in the world, depending on whether you trust the One who made you. Everything downstream of this conviction looks different than everything downstream of its denial.

The third thing is that the gospel is news before it is advice. It announces what God has done, not primarily what we must do. Get the order wrong and Christianity collapses into moralism — a self-improvement program with religious vocabulary. Get it right and even our obedience becomes a response of gratitude rather than a frantic attempt to earn what was already given.

I would like this publication to keep returning to these foundations. Not because the second and third things do not matter — they do — but because we cannot reason well about them until the first things are settled. A house argues about paint colors. A wise builder checks the foundation first.

So before we go anywhere else together, let us get the first things in their place. Everything else, it turns out, depends on them.

— Sunny