Lent Day 5: Interaction with Mary, His mother

Pause

Before you open your Bible today, lift up the circumstances, situations, and relationships in your life where it feels like God is silent or isn’t working. Express your desire to trust God in these things, believing that if it matters to you, it matters to Him.

Read & Journal

Read John 2:1-12. Dig into the passage with these questions/journal prompts:

• What does this passage teach you about Jesus? About His purpose or mission?

• Consider verses 3-5 carefully. Why do you think Mary came to Jesus with this problem?

• When has Jesus worked through a situation or circumstance in your life in a way you never could have imagined, whether big or small?

Ponder

Tradition holds that by the time Mary, Jesus, and His disciples attended this wedding in Cana, Joseph, Jesus’ earthly father, was dead. Jesus was her oldest son, so Mary would have often turned to him with problems or questions. In today’s passage, Mary probably wasn’t asking Jesus for a miracle; she simply saw a problem and turned to her Problem-Solver. She didn’t know what Jesus would do, but she trusted that He could handle the problem. She didn’t understand what He did, but she trusted that He was at work. As believers, we face difficult circumstances and situations we don’t understand. We can choose to turn away from Jesus and try to fix things on our own or turn toward Him and trust that He is at work— even when we can’t see it and especially when we don’t understand.

A Note from Mandy:

Yesterday morning, I stood in my church in Nashville with tears in my eyes as I sang, "What a powerful name it is! What a powerful name it is! The name of Jesus Christ my King. What a powerful name it is, nothing can stand against."

There is a situation in my life right now in which I feel powerless. A fixer by nature, I find my mind whirling with thoughts constantly. "What can I do?" "What if I say this?" "Might this solution work?" And what has been impressed on my heart and soul in the last few days is that I can't fix it. I have to choose moment by moment to lay it in Jesus' hands and trust him to work in a powerful way. I can spend my time and energy and emotions coming up with my own solutions or I can lay it down and trust God to show me the way forward.

The lesson of today's reading isn't that Jesus is our problem-solver. It's that he is powerful—over the situations we think we can handle and the ones we know we cannot. I don't know how God is going to work in this situation or how it could be used to bring him glory, but I'm trusting that it will. If he can turn water to wine, he can be trusted to work in the circumstances of my life.