3/5/2025
If you ask any doctor or any other health expert, they’ll tell you the key to weight loss and general well-being begins, not with a fad diet, but with a healthy lifestyle: nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress management. It’s got to be more than an emergency weight-loss; it needs to be a healthy way of living. Then the pounds stay off, the blood pressure stays down, etc.
Tonight is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent, and it’s a call to a healthy spiritual lifestyle. Like a healthy physical lifestyle, it’s not just now; it’s for now on.
Lent is a season of 40 days, when believers are invited to reflect on their mortality (“remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return”), repent of any unconfessed sin (both things we have done and things we have left undone), and to show our sincerity as well as keeping us mindful of what we’re doing, give up something as a “fast.”
Reflecting on mortality . . . check. Not the most pleasant task, but important for evaluating priorities.
Repentance . . . check. From the Hebrew, shuv, meaning to turn around. I know if I’m heading the wrong direction, I’ll turn and head the other direction toward life. At least, that’s what I’ll do if I’m smart.
Fasting . . . hmm. That’s trickier.
I think it’s pretty common for believers (I’ve actually heard the conversations) to treat Lent like a fad diet: here’s an opportunity to give up something I probably indulge in too much and drop some unwanted weight . . . oh, yeah, and pray more.
Or something.
No, that misses the point of Lent entirely. I’ll get into more specifics tonight, but Lent began as a time for prayerful preparation for difficult times. When people first began observing Lent, Christianity was illegal. It was a time for intense fasting and prayer, when people would purge their lives of everything but faith because they knew that becoming a Christian could land them in prison, tortured and possibly publicly executed.
The practice of fasting for Lent was not to drop a few pounds but to produce a transformation in a person’s life. A profound and lasting transformation.
One of my favorite Old Testament passages is from Isaiah (no surprise) and it deals with fasting for the wrong reasons. Here’s the way Eugene Peterson memorably translates Isaiah 58:5-7 in the Message:
“Do you think this is the kind of fast day I’m after: a day to show off humility? To put on a pious long face and parade around solemnly in black? Do you call that fasting, a fast day that I, God, would like? This is the kind of fast day I’m after: to break the chains of injustice, get rid of exploitation in the workplace, free the oppressed, cancel debts. What I’m interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families.”
This is more than giving up chocolate or cussing.
And notice that this isn’t so much giving up as it is taking on. God is saying, “The sort of fast I want is a fast from wrong-doing AND, if you really love me, I want you to replace your wrong-doing with the things I’m concerned about: taking care of the needs of others” (and here we are again: “Loving God . . . Loving Others”).
So this Lent, reflect on your mortality, yes, but use that reflection to rid yourself of life denying attitudes and actions. Repent, yes, but once you’ve turned around, keep going forward. Fast, yes, but fast from doing wrong and replace that fast with something good.
It can be a personal change like reading the Bible every day (which I hope you’re doing anyway), but I would encourage you to do something beyond that. Because it would truly delight the heart of God, find some way to make a difference in the life of someone else.
Remember, Lent is not a fad diet. It’s the launching pad.
I’ll speak some more about this tonight at 6:00 for our Ash Wednesday service. I hope you will join us for what I believe will be a beautiful, moving service.
Blessings,
Pastor Terry