I Gave It Up for Lent

Okay, I admit it: I don’t know a whole heck of a lot about Lent. I’m a fairly non-liturgical Baptist. And even though I grew up in a Presbyterian church I don’t remember hearing much about Lent. I do know a little, however. I know it begins with Ash Wednesday, a day to reflect on our own mortality. You know, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” All of us are going to die. We should think about that and live a life and find the faith that prepares us for our eventual appointment with death. Lent then proceeds for 40 days (excluding Sundays) until Holy Saturday the day before Easter. Lent is a time to reflect on the sufferings of Jesus and all that He sacrificed for us. It’s somber time, a reflective time, a holy time. And somewhere along the way, this idea of giving up something for Lent was introduced to the church.

So every year I hear some of the things people are giving up for Lent. My experience with such things indicates that most of the giving up tends to be either dietary or media-based. People give up chocolate or sweets or Cokes or booze or fried food. Others give up certain television shows or going to the movies. A few determine to give up something like smoking or cussing or another bad habit that may or may not even be a sin. And it seems like the popular give-up this Lenten season is Facebook. I read some posts from my Facebook friends last Wednesday that said something to the effect of, “If you need to contact me, call or email because I’m giving up Facebook for Lent. I’ll be back on in 40 days.”

This whole thing has always intrigued me. It’s like a 40-day attempt to do something Jesus calls us to do 365 days a year. You remember when He said, “If anyone comes after me let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Lk. 9:23). I guess Lent is a way of trying to do the first of these three actions: self-denial. And if it is, it seems to me that folks ought to consider giving up something important enough that they don’t plan on taking it right back up again when the 40 days are past. Shouldn’t self-denial run a bit deeper than that?

Self-denial is one of the most difficult things Jesus calls us to do. It’s not natural. We learn from birth to exalt the self. A baby’s wet or hungry and what does she do? Does she say, “Oh mother, pardon my intrusion. How selfish of me! You get your sleep first, then I’ll get mine.” Is that what a baby does? Yeah, right. The baby’s going to scream her lungs out until somebody tends to her needs.

Or take a toddler. Suppose your toddler wants something. It doesn’t matter what it is—it could be anything—a little attention, some crackers and juice, his sister’s toy, or to get up from his nap too early—anything. And suppose you’re busy. Does the toddler say, “I’m sorry, mother. I didn’t know you were busy. Please take your time in tending to my wants. Finish your phone call. Wait till your program is over. Finish the chapter. I’m really in no hurry.” Is that what toddlers do? No way! They’ll fuss and whine until you either make them quit or give them what they want.

We tend to be self-centered by nature. It shows up in our lives from birth to death. We want what we want when we want it. Age and reality usually tempers our ability to get it, but it doesn’t stop many of us from trying. Look at credit card debt. Look at chronic overeating. Look at all the addictions. Look at the number of divorces caused by self-centeredness. Look at parents who neglect their kids to satisfy their own wants. Even adults have a hard time saying no to themselves. When Jesus calls us to deny self, He is asking us to go against the flow, to cut across the grain of human nature. So we resist.

And our culture doesn’t make it any easier. Put a drop of self-centeredness in the Petri dish of American culture and it will grow like a fungus. American culture does not treat us as persons but as consumers. Thus, ad after ad to whet our appetite for more, people counseling us to go get ours, and all the “I deserve it” and “I’m entitled” mantras that shout to us through a megaphone of selfishness. And as if that’s not enough, even many of today’s churches treat us as consumers too: “Come check out our programs tailored just for you. We're the home of only seven commandments—you choose. Home of the 3% tithe.” It’s tough to say no to oneself. Even the church isn’t always a lot of help. And yet Jesus calls us to do it: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself ….”

I wonder if the key is not just learning to say no to self but yes to Christ. In Matthew 12 Jesus tells a story about a man who swept his life clean from one evil spirit. But because he didn’t fill the void with Christ, seven spirits worse than the first came back and moved right in. See what I mean: denying self is more than saying no to self, it’s saying yes to Christ. And if we can get that in perspective, it might make giving up something for Lent more meaningful than a 40-day change in one’s eating habits or Facebook usage. What if we picked on bigger things? What if we determined to say no to old grudges and yes to offering forgiveness to those who have hurt us? What if we say no to a certain level of media addiction and say yes to filling up that time reading God’s word or a good Christian book or a little time in prayer and reflection? What if we say no to a relationship that is moving us away from Christ and say yes to relationships that draw us toward Him? What if we said no to spending so much on ourselves and said yes to giving more to the things that are close to God’s heart: things like the church or charities that serve the poor and the wounded? No to self doesn’t mean all that much unless we say yes to Christ.

But then again, what do I know about Lent? I’m a Baptist for crying out loud. I’ll be the first to admit that Lent is a bit of foreign ground for me. But at the same time, I do know this: Jesus didn’t just say, “If anyone come after me, let him deny himself for forty days between Ash Wednesday and Holy Saturday.” The full verse says, “If anyone come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” That looks like no to self and yes to Christ to me—a no and a yes that Jesus will give you the strength to accomplish as you lean into Him.

Oh, and one other thing: taking this path might help us make for some significant change that lasts a lot longer than forty measly days.

Swimming Against the Tide

I’m not one to wear my faith on my shirt or stick it on my bumper. T-shirt and bumper sticker theology leave so very much to be desired. I mean, really, has the Great Commission come to that? But I did see a T-shirt once that sent a message with which I quickly concurred. The caption was simple: “The Christian life.” The picture was a shirt full of fish swimming in one direction, and a single fish swimming in the other—“The Christian life.” What serious follower of Jesus has not felt like that single fish on the T-shirt—swimming against the tide, going against the flow, feeling so very alone in living one’s faith in Jesus Christ? The woman at the office, the man at the Country Club, the kid at school—swimming against the tide. Even in our so-called “Christian nation” it’s not easy to follow Christ against a flow of thinking and talking and living that creates such a strong tide of resistance.

You think you’ve got it bad? Let me introduce you to one of my new heroes. His name is Abdou Diallo. I met Abdou while spending a few days in Senegal. For the last several years teams from our church have invested ourselves in a wonderful little village in northeast Senegal. Though getting there makes it seem like it’s about twenty miles past the Great Commission, God told us to adopt that village and invest our lives and His love there. The people are friendly, kind, and hospitable to a fault. They are also Muslim. We consider them our family and friends. They consider us to be family and friends as well. Our main contact through the village is a man named Ameth, and he is an absolute jewel: so helpful, so kind to us, such a servant to our needs when we are there. We love him greatly. We love the village too. There’s one big problem though: they speak a lot of Wolof, some Pulaar, and some French, and handful of them (like Ameth) speak a little English. Being Americans, however, about all we speak is English (and a few Wolof greetings we tend to butcher beyond recognition).

Enter Abdou Diallo. On our four trips to the village, we have had different interpreters. This time we had Abdou. He lives in Dakar and speaks Wolof, Pulaar, French, and English—amazing. On the way out to the village, I asked him if he was Muslim or Christian. And that’s when he told me his story. Like most West Africans, Abdou was raised Muslim. Yet he had no peace in his life. At a very low point in his young life, he had a dream or a vision in which a person appeared to him and told him that the grace and the truth are in Jesus. Being a Muslim, he already had great respect for Jesus, but he considered Jesus to be a prophet and not the Son of God. That vision changed his thinking. When he found those verses in the Gospel of John that described Jesus as being full of grace and truth, Abdou gave his heart to Jesus. “Jesus changed my life,” he said. And it cost him too. Aside from his mother (who remains Muslim) and a brother who has since also become a follower of Jesus, Abdou has been largely disowned from his family, including the loss of his family inheritance. And since Jesus-followers compose only about 1% of the population of Senegal, he often feels very much alone. He did find a church in which he actively participates. And he continues to grow in his faith—learning more of Jesus and sharing Jesus at every opportunity. This is a bare sketch of his testimony, but you get the idea. You remember that T-shirt with a school of fish swimming one way and a single fish swimming the other? That single fish is Abdou. Yet he swims against the tide without complaint, without bitterness, and without fear. As you can imagine, our team got very attached to him on our trip.

So I wanted to share a bit of his story with you. Would you pray for Abdou? Would you pray that God would meet the needs of his life as he swims against the tide? Would you pray that Jesus would give him courage, peace, and opportunities to quietly share Jesus with his many Muslim friends and neighbors?

Oh, and would you do something else? Would you ask God to give you the grace to swim against the tides in our own culture that would so subtly and quickly sweep you away from Christ? Yes, it might cost you something. No, it’s not easy and it’s not the path of least resistance. But this is what Jesus calls us to do: “If anyone would come after me he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.” Following Jesus means swimming against the tide. And if God can give Abdou what he needs to make that swim, God can surely do the same for us.

Dive on in … though a bit swift in the wrong direction, the water’s fine.