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What If You Could Choose Your Autopilot?

Have you ever pulled off at your exit and realized you don’t remember the last ten miles?

You were driving. You stopped at lights and changed lanes. Everything worked, but in any meaningful sense you weren’t there.

Most of us run large stretches of our lives the same way. We have the same arguments, react to the same irritations, and chase a goal only to feel the satisfaction fade within a week. Autopilot is useful, but it’s only as good as its programming, and most of us never chose ours.

That’s the question behind my new book, Not a Sermon: Five Lessons from Jesus for Anyone Who Wants to Live Better: What if I could choose it on purpose?

Not a book about religion

It won’t ask you to join anything, sign anything, or believe anything before you turn the page. There are no arguments about which church is right or who is in and who is out.

Whatever you believe about who Jesus was, you can treat what he taught like advice from any wise person and ask whether it works. Does it hold up on a Tuesday afternoon in traffic, in a hard marriage, or in a grief you didn’t see coming?

After decades of studying that question, I found that what he actually said is startlingly practical. I boiled it down to five lessons.

The five lessons

1. Love your neighbor as yourself. Most of us skip the last two words. If your inner voice is a prosecutor, your outer voice eventually becomes one too. Self-love isn’t self-importance. It means watering the roots, not polishing the leaves.

2. Forgive, and let the weight go. Forgiveness isn’t excusing, forgetting, or reconciling. It’s setting down something heavy you’ve carried so long you stopped noticing it. As long as you blame someone else for how you feel, your freedom depends on them changing.

3. Look within before you look around. We spot the speck in everyone else’s eye and miss the beam in our own. Waking up from autopilot starts with noticing what’s actually underneath. For me, much of my “anger” turned out to be fear, confusion, and loneliness.

4. Loosen your grip. Do your part fully, then trust. The farmer plants and waters but can’t make the seed grow. Worry feels productive, but it’s interest paid on a debt that may never come due.

5. Serve, and become someone people can lean on. Jesus measured greatness by how many people you serve, not how many serve you. Giving of yourself works less like a battery that drains and more like an alternator that generates power as it runs.

Built to be tried, not just read

Ideas change nothing until they’re tested, so every chapter ends with a short experiment:

• The Neighbor Experiment: listen to how you talk to yourself, then translate it into what you’d say to a friend.
• The Release Letter: a five-step practice for putting down a grudge.
• The Three-Minute Evening Look: three questions that train you to catch your autopilot.
• The Letting-Go Practice: silence, a “control audit,” and a scheduled worry window.
• The Service Week: seven days of small, unannounced acts of kindness.

There’s also a Five-Week Practice in the appendix, one lesson per week, with small steps that favor consistency over intensity.

For believers, skeptics, and everyone in between

I wrote this for people on both sides of the faith question. If you’re a Christian, I hope it sends you back to the words themselves with a mirror in front of you rather than a window. If you’re a skeptic, keep your doubts. Honest questioning is often the road to wisdom, and you don’t have to believe anything to try these experiments.

I’m not writing as an expert. I’ve been a believer, a doubter, a rebel, and a student, and I call myself a white belt for life. The book doesn’t aim at perfection. It aims at progress, because progress is where joy lives.

Start small

You don’t need to read the whole book to begin. Here’s the smallest experiment I know:

Be kind to yourself today, the way you’d be kind to a neighbor. Then see what happens next.

If that ten-miles-on-autopilot feeling sounds familiar, I think you’ll find something useful in these pages.

Not a Sermon by Jimmy Perez is available now

Jimmy Perez is also the author of The Two Within, The Soul University, If I Know Better, Why Am I Not Doing Better?, and Adam’s Journey.

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