What is Lent?
Beginning with Ash Wednesday and ending with Easter, the season of Lent is an important part of the historic Christian calendar. Just as all cultures create occasions and seasons in order to preserve key stories and shape values, so the Christian calendar was created to help Christians shape the rhythm of our time around the life of Jesus. The Christian, or “liturgical,” calendar walks us through each aspect of the gospel story – Jesus’ incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost) – in order that our lives would be more fully rooted and built on in the good news of all Jesus has done for us.
The observance of Lent stretches back to the earliest days of the church as preparation for Easter. It was designed to take followers of Jesus on a yearly journey to the cross and the empty tomb. This focused time of reflection is not only a time for confession and sober self-examination, it also builds anticipation for the joy and triumph of Jesus’ resurrection. Though we are called to live a life rooted in the gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection every day, intentionally observing Lent is a discipleship tool that can create space for the Holy Spirit to expose areas of our lives that remain untouched by God’s grace.
Lent helps us make room for two things we tend to either avoid altogether or only superficially attend to in the normal course of our lives.
1) Get Specific. Our confession of faith encourages us in this way: We ought not to content ourselves with a general repentance, but it is everyone’s duty to endeavor to repent of their particular sins particularly. (WCF 15.5).
But often we settle for a very vague and general kind of repentance. We may be aware of a few nagging sins, but we don’t stop to ask ourselves harder questions about our overall way of life. Much of the time, our life momentum is moving along swiftly in the currents of our self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and false saviors. Lent gives us the chance to step out of the current and ask Jesus, “Is the current of my life moving me toward you or somewhere else?”
During Lent, we set aside time for self-examination to pray, “Search me, God, and know my heart. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psalm 139:23-24). It’s a time to get specific about areas of our lives that need to die, so that we might become more alive to Jesus and his way.
2) Get Real. We are broken and hurting people in a broken and hurting world. The undeniable realities of our limits and the frailties of the body catch up to us all. We all experience loss, confusion, and disappointment. We all walk through valleys. We all carry questions and tensions regarding the pain and injustice we see all around us.
Identifying and expressing these groans as individuals and as a community is an important part of the life of faith. Lent gives us the added push and “permission” we need to take time to get real, to grieve and to groan. During Lent, we set aside time to lament unaddressed grief and loss. We resist the tendency to numb and escape (there is where fasting can help) and instead look to Jesus for our healing and hope.
Reasons Not to Observe Lent
1) For Self-Improvement: For some, Lent can become an occasion to take a dieting fast or give up some other unhealthy habit. While these can be good choices for other reasons and seasons, they miss the God-ward focus of Lent. Lent is not a self-help technique – it’s a recognition that no amount of self-help can save us.
2) Because “I’m supposed to” or “have to” Observing Lent is not commanded, mandatory or obligatory. Like any devotional practice, the observance of Lent can easily be twisted into a merely external or legalistic observance. Lent should never be seen as a “mandatory” practice. Nothing we do during Lent makes God pay attention to us or love us more. Lent is about us paying closer attention to God and the work He is doing in our hearts.
3) As an end in itself. Lent is not the “destination”. It’s a yearly journey to the cross on the way to the joy, hope and triumph of the empty tomb. It doesn’t earn us any points with God or automatically “do” anything.
We must keep in mind repenting and self-examination are not “final destinations” in the journey of the soul. Though most of us must linger much longer in repentance and grieving before God than we normally do, both practices are pathways to new beginnings (“resurrections”). It is true that the doorway into these new beginnings won’t fully open until Jesus opens the gates of the new heavens and the new earth, but the Holy Spirit works now through repentance and renewal in God’s means of grace to lead us into new beginnings of hope and trust.
One reason the early church settled on a forty-day period (Sundays are not counted in the forty days) for the season of Lent is because of the rich significance of the number forty in the biblical story. There were forty days of rain while Noah and his family were in the ark, Israel was in the wilderness for forty years and Jesus’ period of temptation and fasting lasted forty days. Forty represents a period of time where God refines to prepare his people for new beginnings. The forty days of Lent provide a yearly rhythm for letting go and turning from the patterns of our old self in order that God might set us on a new course of obedience and purpose.
Ways to Observe a Holy Lent
During these forty days, I encourage you to create intentional space for one or more of these practices:
1. Prayer - Prayer is the core discipline of Lent. Lent is a great time to begin or refresh a regular practice of prayer. Prayer during Lent should be focused on asking God to examine and search our hearts. We should give extended time to reflection upon our frailty and sinfulness by taking a posture of humility, dependence and repentance before Him.
I use the season of Lent to reset my own discipline of intercessory prayer for others.
Pick a set time or times of day to pray during the season of Lent.
2. Fasting - “Christian fasting is the voluntary denial of something for a specific period of time for a spiritual purpose” (Lynne Baab). Fasting is not for self-improvement, but for training in godliness and self-denial. In learning to say, “No” to legitimate goods, we train ourselves to say “No” to sinful temptation and excess. Fasting hones our spiritual senses by exposing our idolatries and turning our desire from lesser goods to our greatest good – enjoyment of God Himself.
Ideas for Fasting:
Fast from certain types of food – meat, alcohol, sweets, caffeine
Fast one meal on a specific day each week
Fast from dopamine – create boundaries for media consumption or create device free zones of time in your day/week.
Key: Use the space created by your fast to spend time in prayer, scripture.
3. Scripture - During Jesus’ forty days of testing in the wilderness, he fought temptation by quoting from Deut. 8:3, “…man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the mouth of the Lord.” During Lent, we seek fresh ways to draw life from the Word of God. We mediate on and memorize Scripture knowing it is the very source of our spiritual life.
As a baseline practice of Scripture intake, I recommend staying with or starting our church-wide discipleship program, A Good Confession.
Lent can also be a time of focus or deeper study of Scripture.
4. Acts of Mercy and Justice - The fourth rhythm of Lent is giving time to practical works of loving service. This discipline helps us free us from our self-absorption by seeing and meeting the needs of our neighbors. We allow our lamenting for the brokenness and injustice in the world to move us into works of love and compassion. The Scriptures tell us that spiritual disciplines devoid of acts of tangible service toward the needy and oppressed can quickly devolve into religious externalism (see Isa. 58).
Our Compassion Ministry can help you connect to practical needs in our community.
This Year’s Lenten Focus – The Upside-down Way
This year’s Lenten focus will be “The Upside-down Way of Jesus”. This will be a mini-series within our larger series on the Gospel of Luke. We will slowly walk through what is known as Jesus’ “Sermon on the Plain” in Luke 6:20-49. This sermon contains similar teaching to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount found in the Gospel of Matthew.
In this short sermon, Jesus flips upside down many of the natural ways we approach life and relationships. He paints a picture for his disciples of the kind of life he forms in us. Spoiler alert: It’s not exactly the life we would ask for! In many cases, it’s the exact opposite.
As we learn from Jesus’ sermon together, here are some questions to consider throughout the series:
What might Jesus be calling me to leave behind?
What might Jesus be flipping upside down in my life?
What might Jesus be calling me to trust him with that I might follow him more fully?
What step of obedience do I need to take, though it feels risky and backward to me?
Recommended Resources
The Good of Giving Up by Aaron Damiani – My go-to recommendation for anyone new to Lent. It’s best book on observing a gospel-centered Lent available. If you are worried about the legalism surrounding Lent or wondering why we would observe this season, Damiani’s book is the place to start.
Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal by Esau McCaulley – a fantastic introduction to Lent and the practices, prayers and services of the season.
O Sacred Head, Now Wounded by Jonathan Gibson – A rich devotional resource that covers the season of Lent through Pentecost Sunday.