Lent

Resources For Lent

Observing Lent is not required of Christians, but many believers throughout the history of the church have found the heart preparation of this season helpful leading up to Holy Week and Easter. Below is some background on lent and resources to aid in lenten devotional practices.

What is Lent?

Lent is a season in the church calendar with origins in the third-century. Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and lasts the forty days (excluding Sundays) leading up to Resurrection Sunday. Sundays during Lent are "mini Easters" and are still celebrations of the resurrection.

Why observe Lent?

We often enter Holy Week with little prior heart preparation. Easter becomes a weekend affair, rather than the apex of a period of anticipation. Lent prepares us for both the low of Good Friday and the high of Resurrection Sunday. We might think of Lent as similar to Advent.

Lent is oriented around “baptismal spirituality.” This refers to our union with Christ in his death and resurrection. Because we are united with him in his death, we forsake sin through repentance. And because we are united to him in his resurrection, we embrace holiness as a new way of life.

Our baptismal spirituality has both objective and subjective realities. Objectively, God has united us with Christ and all his blessings are ours. Subjectively, we experience our union with Christ in our daily lives through embodied action.

This may be difficult to understand, but baptism itself provides a good example. In Christian baptism, we are both objectively united with Christ (because God does the work spiritually in us) and we subjectively experience our union with Christ (by going under and rising from real water and hearing audible words spoken). When we baptize, we are acting out a spiritual reality that God has brought about in the spirit of the believer. As Kevin Vanhoozer writes in Hearers & Doers, “Baptism is Christian doctrine taught by embodied symbolic action.”

In a similar way, observing the season of Lent provides us an opportunity to subjectively experience union with Christ as we live out repentance and renewal in light of the objective reality of that union.

How do I observe Lent?

The Ash Wednesday prayer from the Book of Common Prayer captures the tone of Lent: "Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” Traditionally, practices emphasize Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 6:1–21 with a focus on fasting, prayer, and generosity. Modern religious culture has distilled this practice down to eating fish on Fridays. For a richer observance of Lent, check out the following resources (including lenten devotionals and ideas on different practices to focus on our union with Christ). Keep it simple and trust the Lord to enrich your practices.