Why Does Choice Matter - Autonomy - Lynn Martin

Good morning. Good morning. Today I'm going to be talking about our choices and the way the world views choice and the way I think that as the Kingdom of God we ought to view our choices.

So in 1930, Aldous Huxley wrote the book Brave New World, and his book describes a utopian future society where the world is ruled by a totalitarian government. The government determines all aspects of people's lives, but nobody complains about it.

They don't complain that they're being controlled because they feel like they have everything that they want. In fact, they do have everything that they want, and they have all the entertainment, drugs, everything else they might want. But the reason they can have whatever they want is that the government has brought them up to enjoy nothing except work and pleasure. Whatever work that they were—whatever work they were intended to do is what they were taught to like doing. And whatever pleasure that the government can give them is what they were taught to enjoy.

One of the characters describes their situation like this: People are happy. They get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off. They're safe. They're never ill. They're not afraid of death. They're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age. They're plagued with no mothers or fathers. They've got no wives or children or lovers to feel strongly about. They're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's Soma, which is a recreational drug that they had come up with that didn't have any side effects.

So many of Aldous Huxley's contemporaries wrote about future societies where the government controlled people by force. But the strange thing about his society is that everybody's happy. Everybody has what they want, and even though the government controls their entire lives.

And at a time when many people were afraid of future violent governments or present violent governments, because there were plenty, Huxley saw that the world could control people more easily through their desires than through force. He saw that the future would hold a society where things would be more comfortable. He saw that things would become more comfortable and easier for everybody. But he also saw that people would let their desires control them and betray them into living foolish and worthless lives.

So I think that Huxley's dystopia, where citizens were pampered rather than oppressed, is one of the most accurate ones in looking forward to the society we see now. He wrote this in the 1930s, but—or whenever I said he wrote it.

But today we see this same sort of thing happening. Instead of the government taking away people's freedoms, which seemed like a threat when people looked at Eastern Europe and Russia, Asia, Western society has moved toward offering people more and more individual autonomy.

So what do I mean by individual autonomy? Basically, the ability for each person to do what they want to do. For example, if a government has autonomy, it doesn't need to listen to a higher authority when it makes its decisions. The city of Chambersburg—actually, I think it's the borough of Chambersburg—isn't an autonomous state because it has to listen to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but the United States of America is an autonomous state because it doesn't have to listen to anybody else.

So in the same way, if I have autonomy, that means my choices are what matter, and it doesn't matter what someone else might choose for me. Autonomy can come in different shapes and sizes. For example, the government might grant me the freedom to choose my religion, but not allow me freedom to say what I want to say. Or maybe I have the freedom to build a shed without a permit, but I don't have the freedom to build a house without a permit. So the fewer limits that a government or other forces place on people, the more autonomy they have.

The trend in modern society that Aldous Huxley saw was that government would tend to give more and more autonomy to individuals so that they could have what they wanted, but they would give them this autonomy in such a way that what people wanted would become predictable and controllable.

A good example of this is what people view as the ideal life. In the 1900s, what middle-class Americans wanted was a suburban house with a garage, a nice yard, a couple of children, a car, a pet, a TV, and some sort of hobby.

If you had all those things, you had everything you wanted. You didn't need to go to a park if you wanted to play outside. You didn't need to go to a theater if you wanted entertainment. You didn't need to take public transportation, so you never needed to sit beside somebody you didn't know, and you didn't have to wait for other people to get on and off the bus.

And if you worked hard, you might be able to send your children to an elite college like Harvard, and then your children could make more money and be even more comfortable than you were.

So more and more people in the 1900s were able to choose what they wanted, but their choices were growing predictable. Today, people want even more in order to be comfortable. They want an entertainment room, a four-wheeler, a boat, and an RV, and more things.

People want to have access to any music or video, so they subscribe to music and video streaming services. Anyone can watch any movie or listen to any song without even buying it or going to a theater again. If you don't happen to have everything you want, though, you can buy that product on Amazon and have it delivered to your door tomorrow.

And in their lives as well, easy divorce makes so that if you don't like who you're married to, you don't have to solve any of your relational issues. You can go somewhere else. Abortion makes so that anyone can have sexual relations and not have major consequences for it.

Drugs are more and more available in case you want to get high. I'm describing all this not so much as a criticism. Some of these things are definitely bad things, but having more autonomy can also bring good things. The reason I'm describing these things is that they demonstrate my point, that the world is trending more and more toward individual autonomy, that people can act on more and more of their desires, that they don't need to worry about the consequences, and they don't need to worry about being defined by what other people want for them or be limited by the people around them.

So if this is a description of the world today, how would it apply to us as Anabaptists? We aren't a part of the world's governments, and we tend to have a separate culture from the world. My point is that we can be drawn into the prevailing mindset of the world and value our own comfort and security too much.

Whether you interact with the world a lot or whether you go to the store just once a week, the world's mindsets will influence you. So we need to be aware of the places where we might be influenced. I think we can slip into a lifestyle of individual autonomy very easily. It's easy for us to each work at our own job, make our own money, have our own house, our own car.

We can have our own snowmower and our own snowblower. We only use the snowblower twice a year, but if we didn't have it, we'd have to borrow it from someone else, and then we'd be dependent on someone else.

Instead, we have our autonomy. We aren't dependent on them. Most of us buy from Amazon sometimes. We can get our packages delivered right outside our door. So if we didn't want to, we wouldn't ever have to leave our bubble, our safe house, and interact with anyone we didn't know.

We can seal off our bubble by using texting and social media to contact our friends who live at a distance, and we can ignore all the people who live nearby. We can just choose who we interact with and choose who we don't interact with. And these conveniences save us a lot of time. They're very convenient, but I don't think convenience is the most important thing.

In fact, the way we live in our own little boxes is unlike any society that the world has yet seen, and it contributes to the breakdown of local communities.

When we live that way, we aren't as interested in what's happening around us. We aren't interested in the neighbors or the people next door. We aren't interested in local events because, I mean, who would listen to local music? Because you could hear better music on Spotify.

And when we live in this way, the only way to practice community is with other people and actually see other people is to hold events in the evenings and on weekends because we're working at our own job during the day. And of course, many of our evenings we're just tired. We want to be conveniently at home. In the past years, people worked together more. They borrowed from their neighbors more often or lent to their neighbors more often. They talked directly to anyone that they bought or sold from. You couldn't buy from someone without actually talking to them.

And none of that's necessary anymore. The world has changed, and we've also changed to a degree. And the changes we've accepted into our lives aren't all bad. And maybe some people here haven't accepted any bad changes into their life.

Maybe. But I don't think that they're necessarily good either.

So in order to evaluate the situation that we find ourselves in, I want to look at a different aspect of our choices. That's free will. So while autonomy means that your choices are what matters and that you should be able to choose your own life, free will means that any choices that you make come from you and that you can choose your own life.

The difference can be seen in the example I gave of Huxley's Brave New World, where people have autonomy. Their lives can happen however they choose them to happen, but they don't have free will because the government controls what they desire, and so they only make the choices that the government wants them to make.

So you only have free will if, whenever you choose something, you could have chosen something different and the people in that society couldn't have. For example, I am preaching right now, and that's a free-willed decision on my part because I could have stayed in bed this morning or I could have been hiding in a closet downstairs, which might be more fun. I don't know.

So my choice to preach is free-willed. No one is making me do it. But if someone came up and pushed me off the platform, I couldn't help but fall down. So that wouldn't be a free-willed decision because I can't help it. There's nothing else that I could have done.

Now, what's strange is that even though the world believes in individual autonomy, more people today, more and more people believe that humans don't have free will. They think that we're like the people in Huxley's story and that our choices aren't real choices. We're controlled by something.

But then why would our choices matter if we couldn't help but choose? If we can't help what we choose? As Christians, we do believe in free will. Now, not all Christians do, but that's the historic faith. We do believe in free will, which means that what we choose actually does matter.

But I'm going to suggest that it doesn't just matter because of our own individual autonomy.

Now, it's important to know that just because we have free will doesn't mean that nothing is influencing our decisions. My decision to preach this morning is influenced by David, who put my name on the sermon schedule. It's influenced by my sense of duty and a number of other things, but I still could have chosen not to preach. So I do have free will, even though I had strong influences influencing me to preach.

And some choices are really, really hard because we have a strong desire not to choose those things. For example, like dieting to lose weight, it's just really hard to choose not to eat or apologizing for something we did. That's just really difficult.

But as long as it's possible for us to choose good, it's our fault if we choose evil. But that doesn't mean that just because it's possible to choose good, that it's very likely that we will. In fact, our desires are often against the good. The Apostle Paul said that before he had the power of Christ, he often wanted to do good, but inside him, his members would wage war against his mind, which left him captive to sin. That's Romans 7.

Even now that we're in Christ, we still have desires that influence us to choose wrongly. The main difference is that now we have Christ's help in overcoming the desires. So it's not like free will is a magic wand that can help you do whatever you want to do. Choosing right is hard, and we need God's help.

But what free will does mean is that we are responsible for the choice that we make. And I can't blame anyone else for the fact that I'm up here preaching today. I can't blame David at all because I chose to be here.

It was my own free will. So our choices are very important. Since we can choose, it matters what decisions we make. And since we can choose between doing good and doing evil, it means that our decisions have real consequences.

Also, I'd like to suggest that our choices help us in making future choices that are similar.

There is an argument that I've heard many times about whether your personality is based on your genetics or whether it's based on the experiences you had in your upbringing. And as I understand, studies show that both of those are factors, but I wonder sometimes when one of the factors that seems to me one of the most important ones is often ignored in those discussions, and that is the past choices that we've made.

One of the largest factors is our own previous choices. So if I've chosen to be self-disciplined in one area, I'll be more likely to be self-disciplined in another area. But if I choose not to control or don't choose to control my anger sometime, next time I'm angry, I'm probably not going to choose to control my anger that time either.

So when we choose to do something, we're also choosing what kind of person we're going to be in the future. And since our past choices make it easier to make similar future choices, what we choose now makes a big difference. Therefore, I would say that free will is a big responsibility.

Now, I believe that some autonomy is a good thing. In fact, as Christians, we're part of one of the first major religions to be based on choice. People used to be part of state religions because the state forced them to be, or they were part of their tribal or ethnic religion because that's what everybody else was doing too. But people first became Christians as individuals and not as nations. And that's the way it should have kept on happening.

That means that people should have the autonomy as to what religion they choose. They shouldn't be forced to join any religion because the only true religion is one that needs to be accepted by choice and not by force.

So even though people should have autonomy in some areas, I think our purpose is bigger than our individual autonomy. After all, God made us, and he set the moral law that we need to follow. It doesn't matter whether or not that I think that stealing is wrong or right. It matters what God thinks, and that's what I'm going to be judged by.

As humans, we're held accountable to a standard that we didn't determine. God determined it. And it's a law that holds true no matter what we desire or what we choose to do.

Also, we have responsibilities toward other people. We aren't just isolated people who live without any context. In particular, the church is a body of people who are responsible for each other. That means that our own wishes aren't the most important thing. Other people's wishes matter too and should affect what we do.

In the world today, we have seen what an overemphasis on autonomy can do. The rates of loneliness, depression, anxiety are rising. Even though people have more of what they want, even though people can choose who they interact with, they're way more lonely now than they used to be.

Suicide rates are climbing. And even while we have easier and more convenient ways of connecting with each other, like Facebook or Zoom or messaging platforms, our interactions have become less meaningful because we aren't interacting with people in person nearly as much.

A more comfortable society is not a more meaningful society, as Brave New World shows clearly. By the end of the story, several of the main characters, they realize that the society just isn't they want more, even though they have everything that they want.

They want something beyond what they have, and they don't know what that is.

The fact is that the meaning of your life can't be created or chosen. Just as meanings of words depend on what exists in the real world, the meaning of your life depends on what already exists: God and your neighbor.

And if you live your life like you're the ultimate authority, you'll be living a miserable, emotionally unhealthy life, as many have found. So clearly, instead of living like we have full autonomy, we'll be better off if we embrace our responsibilities toward God and toward each other.

Since we're responsible for the free-willed choices we make, we should learn to choose wisely rather than to choose convenience or security or whatever it happens to be that makes things easier for us. And in this next section, I'm going to look at how we can begin to choose wisely.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us that we are to seek first the kingdom of God rather than our own comfort or safety. He talks about clothing and food and what we have tomorrow. He says, "Seek first the kingdom, and that will be added to us." He also reminds us of the two great commandments: to love God with all that we have and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

If we love somebody, and this kind of builds a bit on what Kevin shared this morning at communion, we put their interests ahead of our own interests. So I might tell my wife that I love her, but if I won't ever help her unless she gives me something in return, she can know that I don't love her. That's not how love works. And if I say that I love God, but I don't do what he wants me to do, God can know that I don't love him, as John says.

So to love somebody needs to be a voluntary choice.

For example, most people don't pay their taxes because they want to or because they choose to. They pay it because they're afraid of what the government will do to them if they don't pay their taxes. I don't think anyone really enjoys paying taxes. There might be somebody I wish I could meet them. But the point is that paying taxes doesn't mean you love the government because you do it whether you want to or not. And in the same way, if you're forced to do something, that's not love.

It's only if you choose to love that it's love. So because God wants us to love him, he gives us a degree of autonomy. He leaves it up to us whether or not we'll do what he asks us to do. He doesn't force us to do it. He leaves it up to us whether we want to do that. But the consequences are, of course, there, as we've seen already.

Our responsibility is then to choose to actively love God and our neighbor, to sacrifice our interests for the sake of those that we love. In other words, we're given autonomy so that we can give autonomy away. And that might seem like it's limiting, but it's the sort of limitation that frees us up. For example, if you don't limit your intake of an addictive substance, you'll find that the addictive substance will control your life. So you have to put limits on yourself in order not to be limited in some cases. And this is the sort of limit that we should place on ourselves because to love each other and live for each other is what we were meant to be, and that's where we'll be most healthy.

But even though it's a joy to choose wisely, it can also be very difficult. So I'm going to suggest some ways of making good choices easier. Sometimes it's difficult to even know what the right choices to make might be.

And in the area of right and wrong, we have the Holy Spirit to guide us. Sometimes he speaks to us through scripture and sometimes through our consciences or through other people. But if we ask, he does speak to us and let us know what is right or wrong. So even though so much weighs on our choices, even though we have such a responsibility, we shouldn't be petrified by that responsibility because we have help in doing that. And in situations where scripture doesn't make clear statements about an issue, we need to have wisdom. But if we commit ourselves to following God's will, the Holy Spirit will often guide us toward the right direction. James, the brother of Jesus, writes that if anyone needs wisdom, if anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, and God will freely give it to him if he asks sincerely.

That's in James 1:5. So if we're sincerely open to God's will, we can trust him to help us know what's right one way or another. And we also need the help of each other in knowing what's right for us. There might be areas where I'm choosing wrongly, and I just don't know it. So I need to be open to input from any of you to point out those areas that you can see if I can't.

Even sometimes when I know things aren't going well for me and I know I'm making bad decisions or there's something that I'm doing that's wrong, I might not know what the root issue is. I might not know why these things are going wrong. So maybe someone has insight or wisdom in that area.

So I can get help from other people. I don't need to rely only on myself. And as I mentioned earlier, we might need help to make the right choices, even if we know what they are. And through the power of Christ and the presence of God's Holy Spirit, we can have the strength to live as God calls us to live.

And I think that the Spirit also works through the church in helping us to overcome bad habits and sin.

Since I live in a community of people who all want to choose well, it makes it easier for me to choose well. It inspires me to choose my best. And a community can also help take away pressures or stress in areas of life that are keeping me from having the strength to choose well.

And finally, we need our own help to choose well because it's our choice, and that's what it finally comes down to. And by making a good choice now, we can set the ball rolling for us to make good choices in the future.

For example, I found that if I'm uninspired about work, I find it hard to get started. And so I can just choose to sit there and not get started, or I can choose to work at it and decide to make the choice to work at it for, let's say, 15 minutes, or work at it for 15 minutes without complaining, which is hard sometimes, without thinking how much I'd rather be doing something else. And that can set the pace for the rest of the day. The choices, like one small choice that's not that hard, can help us make future choices that are going to be hard and make it easier to make those.

The fact is that choosing well is hard. It takes a lot of discipline and a lot of good choices. But we have the help of the Holy Spirit and each other. And with that help, we can run our race with patience and win the final prize.

So finally, I suggest that we should have a larger vision for the choices we make. Instead of just thinking about how our choices affect our lives, I often said in this sermon that we'll be better off if we make good choices. But that's not the only thing. We should also consider how much good it can do to the world if we build a culture of responsibility.

The world, like I've said, has built an entire society on the ideas of autonomy and individualism, and it has affected us in many ways. But I think that one of the values of the kingdom of God is to rebuild human communities from the ground up, to make us live how God really made us to live. And that those communities will be based on our mutual responsibilities to each other instead of based on our individual wishes.

So for some examples, I suggest that we should earn less and share more, work together, sing together, ask each other for wisdom, and lean on each other and support each other.

And here at Chambersburg Christian Fellowship, I'm really glad that we are trying to do those things. And I think that we'll find that keeping that as our goal, keeping our responsibilities in front of us rather than our own wishes or desires, that it will enrich our lives and the lives of those around us. And as Christians live their lives responsibly, that it will influence the world and change the world around us as well.

So I welcome your thoughts and input, questions, etc., on what I just shared.

I very much appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks.

We definitely are part of an upside-down kingdom. I think from the beginning, man has tried to prove that more independence makes them happier and more fulfilled when, in fact, in God's kingdom, the more that we depend on him and listen to what he tells us to do, and the more we depend on each other and submit to one another, the more fulfilled and happy we are.

And that's just a concept the world doesn't understand at all.

I really appreciate what you shared. Thanks.

One nice thing about the church is it is all of us being interdependent on one another and working together as a body. And I appreciate it in the Anabaptist world, and I assume in other kingdom churches as well, there is a lot of emphasis on submission to one another, which is not what the world teaches at all or preaches. It's, in fact, a bad word generally in the world. But yeah, it's not in God's kingdom. And we would be miserable in heaven in eternity if we're miserable submitting because we're going to spend eternity submitting to God, who knows how many angels or whatever. But there's going to be people we're going to be submitting to because that's part of life in God's universe, what he wants.

And so we get to experience that now. What's going to be eternity? We get to have a foretaste in the church of learning to work together and thinking of the good of my brother or sister, not just what's good for me.

Absolutely. I couldn't help but think as you were talking how I don't think I'm not sure if any of us realize that how much the small decisions build into a big decision. When someone ends up in a bad, terrible situation, you got there because of the small decisions. Now, either you were aware of them or you weren't aware of them. Most people come to me and, "How did I end up here?" Well, I don't know, but you're here.

And it's a result of a whole bunch of little decisions that you thought were insignificant, but it built into something.

Just nobody ends up there without a whole bunch of small decisions. And I think if anything that the kingdom teaches us, the kingdom of God, is that those small decisions build and build and build into something. And no one ever ends up somewhere by accident. It just doesn't happen.

And that goes back to our responsibility and our free will to do what's right. So if you do end up somewhere that you didn't expect, it's simple to fix. Go back and start doing small decisions that lead to correction.

It might be hard, but it's not complicated to figure out. But there's a very powerful, beautiful concept. You do the right thing over and over, and it leads to correction. If there's anything I don't know how to communicate that sometimes, but man, it's just something that I see our Christian society struggling to understand.

And maybe even I don't understand it myself, but I see bits and pieces of it that I really, really see as important. And that's why, like you said, I really appreciate what David said about submitting one another for something through that just being responsible to each other over and over builds us into a direction and something beautiful.

So I appreciate your message. That's very well. Thanks. Yeah, I think definitely the answer is, to a degree, the answer is just really easy. You just make small decisions one after another. That's actually very difficult to do, but at least it's simple.

You know what you need to do. It's 100% true. And what's kind of maybe paradoxical, maybe that's not the right word for it, but when you make a small decision, it seems like nothing when you're experiencing a small decision, and it's usually not fun, it seems like nothing has changed. Nothing just happens.

And it seems like it's going to take forever for there to be some sort of substantial change in my life by these changes of decisions. But then when you look back, you get six months or a year, which isn't really that long of a time. You can look back and say, "Look at what has changed in your mind or in your life or your behavior in one year period." And then you're like, "Wow, that's a huge difference." As I was doing those little things, it didn't seem like anything was happening.

But it just compiles. So when you make that decision and you don't feel like anything's happening, just keep doing it and give it six months, give it eight months, and then you'll be able to and then you will experience life with all of those decisions compounded. And it won't take long to stick with it. That whole thing of choice and reciprocal causality or that thing that it goes both ways.

You make a choice, and your choices affect your propensity to make that choice again.

I drove a payloader at Sawmill for three years. And the forward-reverse switch is like the signal light on most vehicles. And I would get in my truck afterwards. I'd pull it in reverse, and I'd back up and look in my mirrors, and out of instinct, I would be jumping. I haven't driven a payloader for 10 years.

I mean, not playing. But when I get in the tractor and I'm backing up to a trailer at the shop, it's got those two pedals for forward and reverse because it's hypostatic. But instinctively, I still reach up there to get that signal light switch when I want to pull forward and then mash the pedal.

Things like that, simple things like putting screws in a roof. I did it. I put a million screws in. And years later, it doesn't take much to slip right back into that. When you develop the habit, you made a lot of choices in a certain way. It doesn't take much to slide back into that. And so the importance of making good choices and developing good habits is tremendous because a bad habit's the same way. You can get victory over it, but that rut is there, and it's still way easier to slide back into it than if you never started down that road.

The other thing that really, I guess, connected with why my brain spent the last week or so is I got asked to teach at or talk at a parent-teacher conference on in-person classroom instruction versus virtual classroom instruction. And I know I don't have all kinds of scientific reasons, but I was thinking about this issue that you brought up about how we are tampering with face-to-face human community, which is the way we're made to operate and how many ways that's affecting our world, just with the loneliness and lack of purpose in life and a lot of things like that. And it's hard work.

It brings our selfishness to the surface. It makes us have to deal with things, but that's actually good for us because it's hard, but it's also tremendously healthy when we choose to live our life for others and with others rather than in a recliner screen. Yeah, absolutely.

And you're sharing more of yourself with you're sharing way more when you're not interacting on, say, a video screen. On a video screen, all that's there is your head and your voice. Whereas I'm here with everybody. You can see all of me that's not hidden by the pulpit. And I can see you all in real time.

There's just so much more of a shared experience there. And I think that's what makes one of the differences between getting off a Zoom call and feeling depressed and lonely, whereas walking out of here and feeling like, "Oh, this was a good experience."

Yeah. Any further thoughts?

All right. Well, thanks for listening. And let's see. I'll lead us in a prayer. And I guess Radford has a song for us. And then we'll be dismissed, I believe. So let's stand. Yeah.

Father, we thank you so much for this opportunity to be together and to support each other and to show our love for you and for each other, gathering together to be a community of worship to you. And we pray that in going forth from here, we would remember what you have called us to be and the responsibilities that you have for each of us, and that we'd be inspired to make those small choices and fill our responsibilities and grow more and more to be the people you've called us to be. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you for being a part of the Sound Faith Channel as we expand the kingdom of God, seizing territory from Satan with every broadcast.

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