Lent Family Worship Guide

Picking Up Our Crosses Together

Lent is a season for embracing Jesus’ call to pick up our crosses and follow him. As with all seasons of the church calendar, this guide is not meant to add pressure or fill your calendar—it’s meant to gently shape the rhythms you already have.

There is one devotional for each week in the season of Lent until Holy Week (six weeks). As with other longer seasons, choose a consistent day (earlier in the week is better than later) to read the devotional as a family. Read the Scripture, reflect together, and introduce the week’s practice. Let the theme resurface throughout the week—at meals, bedtime prayers, in the car, or during check-ins. 

One question or comment is enough—no need to rehash the lesson, just let it set the trajectory for the week.

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Parent Orientation

Lent: What it is, where it came from, and when we observe it.

What Is Lent?

The name Lent comes from the old English lencten meaning “lengthen” because the days get longer in spring. This has been associated with the annual movement from the death of winter to the renewed life of spring as Lent ends with Easter.

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A Brief History

Lent is one of the oldest church calendar events (first century), originally observed as a forty-hour fast before Easter. In the early third century, Lent was established as a forty-day fast season (excluding Sundays) preceding Easter. 

The early church’s observance of a fast immediately prior to the great Easter feast follows a pattern God established for his people in the Old Testament. Israel’s Day of Atonement fast—it’s only regular divinely-appointed fast—occurred just before Israel’s greatest feast, Tabernacles/Booths. The number forty in the bible is also repeatedly associated with times of testing and trials, including the forty-day rain of the Genesis flood, Moses’ two different forty-day fasts on Mt. Sinai, Israel’s forty years in the wilderness, and Christ’s own forty-day fast in the wilderness. Christ’s fast, in particular, has been associated with Lent in church history.

While some Lent observances, such as fasting and remembering the events of Holy Week, are fairly ancient, other Lent practices such as those of Ash Wednesday were introduced much later.

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What Lent Teaches Our Families

Lent shifts us from vocation (during Epiphany) to self-examination.

The season focuses on the fact that Christ’s resurrection glory comes only through his God-appointed sufferings in our sin-soaked world. Should we prevail in our vocation as the body through which Christ continues to work on earth, we too must humbly embrace our God-appointed sufferings, not the least of which is our progressive dying to our own sin.

Christ alone denied himself and suffered to secure the salvation of the world. It is because of his all-sufficient suffering on our behalf that, in him, our own self-denial and suffering can be used of God to further his redemptive purpose.

Epiphany brought us to vocation. Lent soberly reminds us that the Christ-light we bear is staunchly opposed, and we’re ever tempted to be on the wrong side of the conflict. Through self-examination accompanied by disciplines such as fasting and confession, Lent helps us correct—and stay on—course towards the glory that lies beyond the cross.

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Dates for Lent 2026

Lent begins February 18 and continues until Easter (April 5).