What is Lent and How to Observe It

"Yet even now," declares the LORD, "return to me with all your heart, with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments." (Joel 2:12-13, ESV)

What is Lent, and how do I actually observe it in a way that means something?

Short answer. Lent is the forty days before Easter, running from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday (Sundays usually excluded). It began in the early church as a season of fasting and repentance, originally tied to people preparing for baptism, and it settled into a shared rhythm for the whole church. There's no single correct way to keep it. Most people fast from something, take up prayer or Scripture reading, and give more deliberately to others. None of it earns anything from God. It's practice, clearing a room so you can actually see what's in it before Easter morning arrives.

Where Lent actually comes from

Lent isn't in the Bible as a named observance, you won't find a verse instructing believers to keep forty days before Easter. It grew up in the early church, mostly among people preparing for baptism at the Easter vigil, who fasted and prayed intensively in the weeks beforehand as their whole community fasted alongside them. By the fourth century this had settled into roughly forty days, a number Scripture already treats as significant: Israel's forty years in the wilderness, Moses's forty days on Sinai, Elijah's forty days to Horeb, and most directly, Jesus's own forty days of testing before His ministry began. The word itself is unrelated to any of this, 'Lent' comes from the Old English lencten, simply meaning spring, the season it falls in across the northern hemisphere. Knowing the history matters, because it means Lent is a practice the church built, prayerfully, out of Scripture's patterns, not a command Scripture itself gives. That distinction should change how much weight you put on it. It's a good discipline, not a binding law.

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. (Matthew 4:1-2, ESV)

Fasting the way Jesus described it

The clearest instruction Jesus gives about fasting comes almost as a correction. The religious culture around Him had turned it into a performance, people disfigured their faces so everyone would notice. Jesus doesn't cancel the practice; He redirects it: wash your face, put oil on your head, look, if anything, more ordinary than usual. The fast is between you and the Father, and that's where its value lives. Here's the test I'd put to any Lenten discipline: if the point becomes whether people notice you're doing it, you've already lost what fasting was for. Giving up coffee or sugar or your phone for forty days isn't wrong, but it isn't automatically spiritual either, it only becomes prayer if you actually turn toward God in the gap it creates. Paul describes the same discipline almost athletically: 'Rather, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize' (1 Corinthians 9:27, NIV). Fasting, in both pictures, is neither performance nor sheer willpower. It's meant to make room.

But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. (Matthew 6:17-18, NIV)

The discipline people skip: giving

Ancient Lenten practice was built on three legs, not one, fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. Most modern observance keeps the first two and quietly drops the third, maybe because giving something up feels more dramatic than giving something away. But Jesus's picture of final judgment in Matthew 25 doesn't ask what anyone fasted from. It asks who was fed, clothed, visited, welcomed. If Lent only shrinks your own life without expanding your attention to anyone else's, it has missed half of what the tradition was built to do. This is where Lent stops being private. Volunteering somewhere unglamorous, checking on someone you've been meaning to check on, giving away the money you'd have spent on whatever you gave up, none of it needs an audience, but it does need to leave your own head for a while. Self-denial that never turns outward tends to curdle into self-focus with extra rules attached.

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me. (Matthew 25:35, NIV)

Repentance that doesn't drown in guilt

The Ash Wednesday reading most churches use comes from Joel, written to a people who'd let their faith go through the motions. The rending of garments was a visible, dramatic sign of grief in that culture. God asks for something less visible and more costly, the heart itself, not the performance of sorrow. Lent gives that kind of honesty somewhere to go. Whatever surfaces when you slow down, old resentment, a habit you've stopped confronting, the sin you've gotten used to carrying, Lent isn't the season to manage it quietly. It's the season to say it out loud to God. 'If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness' (1 John 1:9, ESV). That's the promise underneath the whole season. Not that you'll arrive at Easter having fixed yourself, but that confession is met, every time, by a Father who was already planning to forgive you before you asked.

"Yet even now," declares the LORD, "return to me with all your heart, with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments." (Joel 2:12-13, ESV)

Where this is not simple

Here's what an honest reader should ask: if Lent isn't commanded, how much should it actually shape my life? Christians land in genuinely different places. Catholic and Orthodox tradition carries specific expectations, abstaining from meat on Fridays, for instance, that most Protestants don't observe and some regard with real suspicion, worried that fixed rules slide into the very performance Jesus warned against in Matthew 6. Others push back from the opposite direction, worried that skipping Lent entirely means losing a discipline the church has found formative for seventeen centuries. There's a sharper tension too. Isaiah has God rejecting a fast that changes nothing about how people treat each other: 'Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness... to let the oppressed go free' (Isaiah 58:6, ESV). Giving up chocolate while ignoring someone in genuine need isn't the fast Isaiah describes. I don't think that makes small fasts worthless, it means the discipline is only doing its job if it softens you toward other people, not just toward your own cravings. Where you land on the rules matters less than whether the season changes anything real.

If this is not theoretical for you

If fasting has ever been tangled up for you with an eating disorder, disordered control, or a body already fighting chronic illness or diabetes, please hear this plainly: skipping food is not a spiritual requirement, and no verse asks you to risk your health to prove devotion. I'm a pastor, not a doctor, if you're unsure whether fasting is safe for you, that question belongs with your GP or a counsellor first, not with me. There are dozens of faithful ways to keep Lent that have nothing to do with food: giving up scrolling, taking up silence, adding prayer, adding service. And if you're observing this season inside depression or grief, forty days of extra self-scrutiny can do real damage rather than good. Sometimes the most faithful Lenten discipline is simply staying gentle with yourself while you keep showing up to ordinary life. God is not measuring your suffering. He already knows what this year has cost you.

Questions people ask

Do I have to be Catholic to observe Lent?

No. Lent predates the split between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches, and plenty of Anglican, Methodist, and now non-denominational congregations observe it. Nothing in Scripture restricts it to one tradition, and nothing requires it either. If your church doesn't mark it, you're free to keep it privately, choosing a fast, a practice, or a Scripture reading plan that fits your life, without needing anyone's permission or a specific liturgical calendar to make it count.

What if I break my Lenten commitment partway through?

Then you've learned something true about yourself, which was probably part of the point. Lent isn't a vow with legal weight; there's no penalty clause. Confess it, as 1 John 1:9 says, and pick the discipline back up the next day. The forty days were never meant to prove you have enough willpower to white-knuckle through, they're meant to show you how much you need grace, which you'll discover a lot faster by failing than by succeeding.

Why forty days, and do Sundays count?

Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday is actually forty-six days. Most Western traditions don't count the six Sundays in between, treating each one as a small Easter, a weekly reminder that resurrection, not deprivation, is the main event. So depending on how strictly you're keeping a fast, Sundays are often treated as a breather. Eastern Orthodox practice calculates it a little differently. Either way, the number forty is meant to echo Scripture's testing seasons, not to be mathematically rigid.

If you want to go further

Journey to the Cross: A 40-Day Lenten Devotional by Paul David Tripp

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