Do you sometimes find it difficult to live up to Jesus’s expectations of you or even what you expect of yourself as a disciple of Jesus? Do you occasionally get down in the dumps because you just don’t think you’re measuring up as a Christian? 

Be at peace. Jesus fully understands. In fact, He had to pray a lot to get the Father’s help for Himself. And just before His crucifixion, He spent an agonizing night in prayer to see and obey His way forward to the cross. Yes, Jesus knows the challenges and sacrifices we face in following Him and being like Him. 

Lent helps us to realize that the Christian life is a journey. Jesus described Himself as “the Way” (John 14:6), and the apostle Paul confessed in his trial before Governor Felix that he was a follower of this group of disciples who were known as “the Way” (Acts 24:14). Being a Christian does not mean you have arrived. It means you’re following the One who is the Way. You are on the way. But you have not yet reached your destination. 

Wait a minute, you may say. I’ve been saved. Doesn’t that mean I’ve been forgiven of my sins and my heart has been cleansed? Of course it does. But remember, you’re on a journey called “following Jesus.” You haven’t yet become fully who God wants you to become. You will face new or perhaps recurring situations and challenges. You will need new grace and spiritual insight. You will need new awareness of your inadequacies, your failures, your need for greater spiritual depth. This awareness will then lead you to confess your shortcomings and sins so that you can continue the next phase of your journey with Jesus. 

You may have heard the word Lent from time to time. It comes from an old English word that meant “spring.” Christians use the word to refer to the 46 days before Easter. These are days for examining ourselves with the Spirit’s help so that we can see ourselves as we truly are, and we do it by comparing ourselves to Jesus, our model. Yes, our model. Jesus is our Lord and Savior, but He is also our example. He started His public ministry at around age 30. He gathered 12 disciples and became their spiritual mentor. In Jesus’s day, the Jews called such a person a rabbi, which was how Jesus was usually addressed. The rabbi’s calling was to make disciples by both teaching a way of life and demonstrating how to live it. The true Christian is a disciple possessed by the goal to be more and more like Jesus. You may have sung a chorus:

To be like Jesus, this hope possesses me.
In every thought and deed, this is my aim, my creed.
To be like Jesus, this hope possesses me.
His Spirit helping me, like him I’ll be.

The season of Lent is a time set aside to study Jesus and what He said and how He lived. It is a time of spiritual meditation, self-discipline, confession and prayer. During these days, we look at ourselves through the lens of Jesus. We do this by reading Scripture, especially the Gospels, immersing ourselves in the story of Jesus: His self-giving love, the singular thrust of His life toward obedience to God’s will and purpose, the pain He endured for us, the radical teaching He expected us, His followers, to live by. We then claim Him as our Lord with greater depth and meaning. We rediscover this man from Nazareth. We ask the age-old question: Who is He? We find ourselves captivated by the age-old answer: “It’s the Lord, the King of Glory!” And we respond: “At His feet we humbly fall. Crown Him, crown Him Lord of all!”

The spiritual journey we call Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which this year is on February 22. It’s called Ash Wednesday because some churches take the palm branches that are used to celebrate Palm Sunday, burn them to ashes and store them so that they can be used the next year to form an ashen cross on Christians’ foreheads to signify an attitude of sorrow for the person’s sin. This sorrow is called penitence, and it is the right attitude for the Lenten season, whether or not we put ashes on our foreheads. The important thing is to focus on Jesus and allow the light of His love and His life to expose what we need to confess and where we need to grow and look more like Him. Then we can, by the grace of God and with the Spirit’s help, make the changes toward Christlikeness that really matter. 

for further REFLECTION 

A good way to travel this Lenten journey is to use a book of meditations for each day of Lent.

Read:

• Lenten Awakening by Commissioner Phil Needham (Crest Books). It can be used as a book of personal devotions from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. The reader can use it personally as part of their daily prayer time or can combine this with a weekly meeting of a peer group or a discipleship group, with each person sharing spiritual insights and personal challenges that have come during the week, and then praying for one another. 

Phil and Keitha Needham are retired Salvation Army officers (pastors) living in Atlanta. They share a vision of The Salvation Army as a missional people of God who are called by Christ to be disciples who follow Him, serve Him and share His compassion with others, especially the poor and excluded.