Why I Practice Lent

As you may already know (or otherwise would have realized when you got to work and saw a few coworkers with smudges on their foreheads), today is Ash Wednesday. As recently as 5 years ago, that would have meant nothing to me. Having been raised in a relatively conservative Texas Baptist church (the same church which I now serve as pastor), Ash Wednesday and Lent, the season it inaugurates, were not part of my faith tradition. Frankly, I thought Lent was just a Catholic thing, in the same vein as transubstantiation and the veneration of Mary.

So when I saw that my seminary was hosting an Ash Wednesday service in 2012 (my first year there) in conjunction with Baylor’s department of religion, I chalked it up to a gesture of ecumenism and didn’t give it another thought. But the next year, when my covenant group (a small group you’re required to meet with for four semesters) decided our focus for the semester would be on the Christian calendar, that worship service suddenly became an important part of my educational experience.

What I found in that service was something often neglected in evangelical worship: confession. For a solid hour, everyone gathered in the chapel sang hymns, recited readings, and eventually received ashes, all in the service of one fundamentally Christian message: Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner. There was no talk of salvation, sanctification, or resurrection—all that, it was understood, would be preached soon enough. For that hour, we solemnly reflected on our own inadequacy before God and cried out for mercy and forgiveness. Having initially planned to just observe, instead when the time came for the bestowal of ashes, I went forward with everyone else, bowed my head, and received a blessing and the sign of the cross on my forehead.

Since that day, I have counted Lent as an important part of my relationship with God and a crucial time of preparation for Easter. Just as Advent and its weekly themes of hope, peace, joy, and love prepare the heart for the remembrance and celebration of Christ’s birth, so Lent prepares the heart for the agony of Good Friday and the surpassing joy of Easter Sunday through the practice of intentional self-denial.

In Matthew 16:24, Jesus told his disciples (and so, by extension, Christians today), “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Jesus was talking about a holistic, complete denial of yourself, about turning your entire life over to him, from temptations to actions to goals. While most evangelicals think of this as part of your initial profession of faith and baptism, the honest Christian recognizes that making Jesus your Lord is not something you do once, but on a practical level is something you have to do every day, every hour, every time that the siren call of “what do I want?” beckons. Denying yourself is not easy, is perhaps even unnatural in our fallen state, but for those called to be “crucified with Christ,” it is part what it means to be disciples.

So Lent is a time when, as an isolated move toward that more holistic self-denial, you intentionally take something away from yourself. That something doesn’t have to be sinful—if you struggle with a habitual sin, I would hope it wouldn't require the arbitrariness of the calendar to draw you to repentance—but neither should it be something you can give up easily. My personal measure of whether I’ve chosen my Lenten sacrifice well is if, after thinking about giving it up, I say, “Oh, but I really like doing that. Maybe I should pick something easier.” The point is that, whatever you choose to take away, it be something habitual, something difficult for you to imagine going without.

Giving something up for Lent is not about punishing yourself or doing penance for your sin—your sins are already paid for and you have been redeemed by the blood of Christ. Neither is it about self-improvement, though that often comes as a fringe benefit. It’s about taking concrete action toward making less of yourself and more of Christ. Just like the biblical practice of fasting, it’s about removing the distractions of the day-to-day and giving your full focus and faith to God.

The benefit of practicing Lent, I have discovered, is that it amplifies the power of Easter and spiritually prepares you for its joy. Instead of spending just a weekend thinking about the cross and the empty tomb, you spend a month and half absorbing their meaning. Instead of just hearing about sacrifice, you experience it, even as it pales in comparison to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Instead of being simply a consumer of Easter worship, you can truly count yourself as an intentional participant. When Easter arrives, Lent ensures that it comes not just as one holiday of many, but as the glorious culmination of a season of deliberate discipleship.

If Lent has always seemed foreign to you, let me encourage you to give it a try this year. You don’t have to follow every one of the Lenten traditions—for example, while I do fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, I don’t do the whole no-meat-on-Fridays thing. But I encourage you to engage in some meaningful practice(s) of self-denial in pursuit of that biblical command to take up your cross and follow Jesus. I think you’ll find yourself surprised by how much God will teach you when you take your self out of the equation.