What has Lent got to do with me?

It is that time of year again. The sun is a little warmer, the birdsong is a little louder and the daffodils are tentatively emerging. Spring is about to be sprung!

With Spring’s arrival, the more ‘church orientated’ among us will be aware that the season of Lent has also just begun. Lent’s forty days (not including Sundays) run from Ash Wednesday all the way to Easter Sunday. Yet look in any Bible (or Bible Dictionary) and the word ‘Lent’ will not appear. It is thought to come from the Anglo Saxon word lencten meaning lengthen, and refers to the lengthening days of spring. Appropriated by the church (to a greater or lesser degree depending largely on what side of the Reformation you stand!), the forty days are now taken to represent the time Jesus spent in the wilderness, enduring the temptations set before him by the Devil (read all about it in Matthew 4:1-11) as preparation before he began his public ministry. 

So, what has Lent got to do with me?! 

It is a good question. Christians of all stripes have often used this time to deny themselves (certain food, alcohol, pleasures etc.) to empathise with the trials Jesus faced in the desert. Yet the danger with this spiritual practice is that the focus becomes on what we feel we can offer God, rather than what God offers to us. We risk losing sight of what those original forty days showed us about our Saviour and ourselves.

Jesus’ endurance through temptation proved he alone was fully qualified to save. Jesus’ ministry ultimately led him to the greatest struggle – and therefore the greatest temptation to give in – at the cross. Unlike the first humans who gave into temptation in Eden, Jesus alone persevered for sinners like you and me who do not. 

Those forty days are not to give us an example to follow, but to reveal Jesus’ divinity. We’re not called to attempt to rack up merit before God, but to worship in the face of his majestic work. 

Now, please don’t mishear me. There is a place for voluntary fasting (for both spiritual and physical health reasons!). But the season of Lent should first and foremost be a time to consider again the wonder of God’s grace in Jesus. Jesus is the one whose significance and relevance is laid bare through the events of the Easter weekend. Jesus is the one whose offer of ‘life in all its fullness’ (John 10:10) remains extended to us all. 

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis writes that a ‘strange feeling – like the first signs of Spring, like good news, had come over [the Pevensie children]’ when they first heard Aslan’s name. This Lent, as new life emerges and Spring begins again, consider afresh the good news of the gift of God’s Son who persevered for you.