What is Lent?
Lent is the six week period leading up to Easter Sunday. Just like Advent helps us prepare for Christmas, Lent is a season of preparation for celebrating Jesus’s death and resurrection.
Throughout history, Christians have traditionally practiced fasting during Lent as somewhat of a palate cleanser to enjoy the feast of Easter. Starting on Ash Wednesday (this year 17 February), we enter a period of 40 days of fasting (not including Sundays). The forty day period recalls Israel’s 40 year wandering in the wilderness prior to entering the Promised Land, and Jesus’s 40 day trial in the desert. Sundays are excluded from the period of fasting as Sunday—the Lord’s Day—is always celebrated as a feast.
By practising Lent, we are invited to enter into the Easter Story each week: dying to sin and our desires through fasting, reminding ourselves of Jesus’s willing sacrifice for us; then breaking the fast each Sunday anticipating Jesus’s resurrection.
Why Fast?
We must be attune to some of the dangers of fasting, including:
- performing for the approval of others
- missing the gospel, thinking that our religious observance is what makes us right with God
- ignoring the fast that the Lord requires—justice and mercy
- seeking God’s blessings rather than seeking God—fasting must be centred on God!
- thinking that food (or physical reality) is evil. No, everything created by God is good and intended to be received with thanksgiving
- forgetting to feast
Despite its dangers, Jesus himself fasted, and assumed his disciples would fast. Fasting has been practiced as a spiritual discipline throughout history as a way to break the power of the flesh and hunger for God.
The benefits of fasting include:
- fasting embodies and sustains our hunger for God. We’re saying with our bodies how much we need and want and long for God.
- fasting teaches us that lasting satisfaction is found in God alone, not in immediate gratification in food (or sex, or Instagram, or …)
- fasting grows us in self-control. As we say “no!” to whatever we’re fasting from, we’re training our self-control muscle and growing in this fruit of the Spirit.
- fasting helps us put sin to death. We live in an age of excess, luxury, and addiction. Our desires control us, and fasting can act as a circuit breaker for us to pull up the weeds in our lives, so to speak.
- fasting grows us in self-awareness. Fasting can expose what controls us. We often cover up what is inside with food and other good things. When we fast from these shallow dependencies, we create room for what is really inside us to surface.
Why are we practicing Lent at Anchor?
We resist the myth of progress, and the assertion that newer is necessarily better— “chronological snobbery” according to C. S. Lewis. No, we gladly receive the traditions that have been handed down to us as helpful tools and practices for us to live out our faith. We join with Christians throughout history and around the world today in this practice as an expression of historical awareness and unity with the rest of God’s family.
We believe that practising Lent heightens our awareness of the good news of Christ crucified and risen. It embodies that good news in a tangible way in our lived experience and prepares our hearts to celebrate Easter. Indeed, it makes our Easter celebration much more than a one-hour church service. Instead, we’re shaping our whole lives around the good news of Easter as we prepare to celebrate that Christ is risen!
We believe that our practices deeply form us. Our desires for food, sex, and technology create powerful attachments in our hearts that can be unhealthy and need to be broken. Entering a season of fasting and abstinence can break the powerful of these desires and attachments, and allow us to cultivate new and healthy desires and attachments for God.
How to Practice a Lenten Fast
- Choose something to fast from. You might like to fast from alcohol, coffee, sugar, or meat (or whatever else!). But it doesn’t have to be food-related either. Technology might have more of a hold over your desires and it may be more powerful for you to fast from Netflix or Instagram. Ask God what is exerting a powerful influence over your desires, and fast from that!
- Pray & Reflect. When the urges come, turn them towards God in prayer. Use the season of Lent to seek God in a more-focused way through Scripture reading and prayer.
- Give. Almsgiving has traditionally been observed as a Lenten practise alongside fasting & prayer. Practising generosity prevents us from turning Lent into an individualistic exercise and allows us to enter into the Easter story of God’s love for the world displayed through costly generosity.
- Feast. Remember to break the fast each Sunday. Celebrate with God’s people each week the beautiful reality of our new life in Christ. Lent culminates with Resurrection Sunday flowing onto a 50-day season of celebration called Eastertide. Let’s remember that fasting is always for feasting!
There is freedom in Christ to fast, and not to fast. There is no obligation for you to practice Lent this year. But we do believe God has something for us as a church family this year as we enter into the practice of fasting. It will be hard, but God is going to use it to grow us up into the likeness of our Lord Jesus.
Resources
- The Lent Project
- Practising the Way: Fasting
- Walking With Jesus: Anchor’s Easter Devotional (over 25,000 completions on YouVersion)
- The Glory of the Cross (Lent Devotional by Tim Chester)