A Word About Autonomy

When I was growing up, I thought my dad was the smartest man in the world.

I remember riding in the car with him and wondering how he always knew where he was going and how to get there. He knew when it was his turn to go, at a stop sign. He knew what we needed at the grocery store. He knew how to write a check when it came time to pay for it all. He didn’t ask for help. He didn’t seem unsure. He just … knew. As a little boy, I didn’t have a word for it, but I was watching a man live with a kind of settled confidence. He was self-directed. Independent. Standing on his own two feet.

We use a word for that today: Autonomy.

We Americans like that word. We like the idea of being able to choose for ourselves, to decide our own path, to live on our own terms. And there is something in that idea that is true.

The desire to choose isn’t a flaw. It’s part of how we were made. From the very beginning, man was given responsibility. A garden to tend. Animals to name. Think of it. Decisions that mattered. There is dignity in that. A sort of quiet honor, I guess, in being designed with a will that can choose. However, that will to choose was never given to us to indicate that our choices begin and end with us.

In Genesis, Adam is placed in a world he did not imagine, surrounded by beauty he did not design, listening to The Voice of God he did not create. He could choose. That was never in question. But he was never the one who got to decide what everything meant.

There’s a difference between having a will… and being the final word on everything your will touches. Paul says, ‘From Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things.’ 

The Bible describes a time in Israel’s history when “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” That’s not a picture of people without choices. It’s a picture of people who made themselves the measure of those choices.

Jesus offered something very different. Something eternally profound. In John chapter 5, He said He could do nothing by Himself, only what He saw His Father doing. Not less engaged. Not less aware. But not alone in it. Freedom to choose isn’t defined as standing completely on our own… it’s found in loving the God we stand with. We still choose. Our lives still matter. Our decisions still carry weight.

But we are not the authors of the story we’re living in. And there is a kind of rest that comes with that kind of expression of our freedom in Christ. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” says Paul in 2Cor. 3:17.

Not the freedom of being untethered to any constraint, but rather the freedom that comes from being united with Christ, equipped, engaged in the life God had in mind for me all along. It feels like I’m living in the heart of a God who is way smarter than my dad who I thought was very smart. I serve an omniscient God who knows all there is to know … about all there is to know.