Lent?

For the next several days I'll be sharing some daily thoughts about Lent on STTA. If you don't receive it via email you can find these thoughts on the STTA Blog. It is linked on this site. I guess you could call these posts, "Thoughts on Lent from a Guy Who Doesn't Do It."
I'll be putting some additional information here.
I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Here is an article from the Catholic Encyclopedia, which will likely tell you more than you want to know about the subject of Lent, but hopefully will contain somethings that will interest you: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09152a.htm

Here is an article from one of the more thoughtful Evangelicals of our day, John Piper, about some ways you might want to consider that might help you accomplish some of the good purposes of Lent in your heart: http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/TasteAndSee/ByDate/1987/3673_Lenten_Preparations_for_Good_Friday_and_Easter/

The Reformers made these points against unreformed Rome, but they were well aware that in making them they were fighting over again Paul's battle in Romans and Galatians against works, and in Colossians against unauthentic traditions, and the battle fought in Hebrews against trust in any priesthood or mediation other than that of Christ. And (note again!) they were equally well aware that the gospel of the five "onlies" would always be contrary to natural human thinking, upsetting to natural human pride, and an object of hostility to Satan, so that destructive interpretations of justification by faith in terms of justification by works (as by the Judaizers of Paul's day, and the Pelagians of Augustine's, and the Church of Rome both before and after the Reformation, and the Arminians within the Reformed fold, and Bishop Bull among later Anglicans) were only to be expected. . . .
To the Reformers' doctrine of justification by faith alone Reformed theology has held down the centuries, maintaining it to be both scriptural in substance and life-giving in effect.17 This tenacity has, however, involved constant conflict, as it still does. Two things have long threatened the truth as stated: first, the intruding of works as the ground of justification; second, the displacing of the cross as the ground of justification. Both are familiar weeds in the church's garden; both express in very obvious ways the craving for self-justification which lurks (often in disguise!) in the fallen human heart.

Read the entire article by J. I. Packer,SOLA FIDE: THE REFORMED DOCTRINE
OF JUSTIFICATION