Have you ever wondered why cars are called automobiles? I’m sure you’ve spent many hours pondering this very thing! Well, the car was given the name automobile not because it automatically drives itself, like an autopilot flies a plane, but because it is self-propelled. The automobile doesn’t need a horse to pull it or legs to pedal it since its built-in engine provides the power to move it along. So what, you might ask? Well, this name is very relevant to our discussion because the auto in automobile originally comes from the Greek word autos, meaning self.

Being self means that we are autonomous as to our decisions—in a figurative sense, self-propelled. It means that though we are absolutely dependent on God, even to the point of taking our next breath, He has designed us such that we are endowed with the capacity of independence in regard to the choices we make for our lives.

Self is simply me, a personal being given the glorious gift of existence and awareness. “It is the man’s “I AM,” a gift from the I AM who created him…,” as A. W. Tozer puts it. But this gift of being has the effect of placing me at the center of my own personal universe. Asked if we think the world revolves around us, most of us would deny it. Yet given the nature of me, it would be hard to truly believe otherwise!