Name Your Crowns and Lay Them Down

This encouragement was written for Ozark Worship Night in Fayetteville, AR in December 2022.

When we bring our cares to the Lord, there are some cares that He takes gently and holds close because they are important to Him. But there are other cares that He tosses aside to set us free from them.

God is inviting you to bring your cares and fears and sins and pursuits to the Him so He can guard or release them.

When the elders cast down their crowns before the throne, those are not crowns of worldly ambition or fleshly desire. They tossed those aside long ago. These are the true crowns of unfading glory and honor that God gave to them (1 Peter 5:4, Psalm 8:5).

God invites you to do the same. Surrender everything: your anger and pain, your ambition and control, your sin and unbelief, even your calling and the work of your hands.

When God invites you to surrender, you may feel like you’re standing on a high dive, looking down at the water with a strange mix of delight and terror. You’re afraid to jump… but you’re even more afraid that if you don’t jump soon, you’ll get off the diving board.

What can you expect when you jump? Expect Him to keep His promises. Scripture says God will transform your mind, heal your heart, build you up, guard you, and satisfy you completely. He “is able to do abundantly more than you could ever ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).

But first, you have to surrender.

For, how can we be healed if we don’t first submit to letting the arrow be drawn out? How can we be built up if we do not first yield to the builder’s blueprint? And how can we be guarded if we do not first cast out the enemy from within us?

Jesus stood on a high dive once. And Jesus jumped (see Philippians 2). If He jumped out of heaven, leaving behind His rightful glory, how much more should we jump and leave behind our collapsing sandcastles of vainglory that we built for ourselves?