John 20:1 “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance.”
“These acts shattered steel, but they can’t bend the steel of American resolve.” Those words of President George W. Bush sum up the mindset at the 9/11 Memorial where the World Trade Center once stood. After eleven years of nonstop clean-up and construction, 3,000 workers plus hundreds of security guards and policemen stationed throughout the site, the work was finally completed.
When my husband and I visited the Memorial, it was impossible not to revisit the horrors of the attacks, but it also dawned on us that the reproach we felt as Americans that day was slowly being removed. The new tower stands taller than the others, like a witness to the country’s determination not to let our enemies have the last word.
The natural tendency, whether attacked as a nation or an individual, is to do whatever we can to roll back the disgrace and humiliation of our circumstances. Who likes feeling vulnerable to even more attack? But human resolve, no matter how strong, can never erase the depth of shame that resides in the heart of man. It takes something supernatural to remove it.
Consider the stone that sealed the tomb of Jesus…
It stood as a stone of reproach. It declared that God—and all the hope of redemption he brought with him—was dead. Seemingly immovable, it sealed him, as well as our shame, in a tomb of failure. But death’s victory was short-lived… The stone could not hold back the Lord of life. When it was rolled away, the reproach it signified rolled right away with it.
Do you know that the stone of reproach has been rolled away in your life? You no longer have to live under a cloud of shame or an ongoing sting of failure. No matter how many times failure tries to seal you in a grave of hopelessness, the supernatural power of God will roll the reproach away again…and again…and again.
And His is a resolve that can never be shattered.