I attended a Catholic school for 12 years of my life. On this day, all of my friends went to have their ashes placed on their heads by the local parish priest. Usually, if someone has a mark on their head, the kids would laugh at them. But on this day, I was the oddball. I was the only one without a mark on my head since I knew I wasn't a Catholic and refrained from receiving ashes. It made me not only self-conscious, but uncertain of really what I believed about religion and faith. We should wrestle with the significance and motivation for receiving ashes.
Carl Trueman addresses this very subject, says:
An appropriately rich Reformed sacramentalism also renders Ash Wednesday irrelevant. Infant baptism emphasizes better than anything else outside of the preached Word the priority of God's grace and the helplessness of sinless humanity in the face of God. The Lord's Supper, both in its symbolism (humble elements of bread and wine) and its meaning (the feeding on Christ by faith) indicates our continuing weakness, fragility and utter dependence upon Christ.
In light of this, I suspect that the reasons evangelicals are rediscovering Lent is as much to do with the poverty of their own liturgical tradition as anything. American evangelicals are past masters at appropriating anything that catches their fancy in church history and claiming it as their own, from the ancient Fathers as the first emergents to the Old School men of Old Princeton as the precursors of the Young, Restless, and Reformed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer as modern American Evangelical. Yet if your own tradition lacks the historical, liturgical and theological depth for which you are looking, it may be time to join a church which can provide the same.
I also fear that it speaks of a certain carnality: The desire to do something which simply looks cool and which has a certain ostentatious spirituality about it. As an act of piety, it costs nothing yet implies a deep seriousness. In fact, far from revealing deep seriousness, in an evangelical context it simply exposes the superficiality, eclectic consumerism and underlying identity confusion of the movement.
James Merrick writes a response to Trueman. And then Trueman adds a rejoinder to Merrick.
Whether you decide to get ashes placed on your head is not a critical issue and like Carl Trueman notes in his blog article, there is freedom in Christ to do so. However, I only hope that those ashes are not in place of one's trust in Christ, in the gospel, in His Word, in the Lord's Supper, in our baptism, and in the gathering of His people as the church. Sadly, there are many people who believe the ashes save, and so they will make sure to run inside a church for the mark without ever having their hearts marked and sprinkled by the blood of Jesus. Ashes fade, but the blood of Christ and His Word stand forever.