Jesus
The center of everything we are as a church.
Everything at Cedar Lane revolves around Jesus. We are his disciples, and our church exists to help people follow him.
Jesus is God Incarnate
The Bible not only tells us Jesus is divine, but shows us what that means. He is one with the Creator, loves his creation deeply, and has unlimited power. And yet, he freely took on human nature as well. He was humbly born into our world—joining humanity in all our weakness and vulnerability. Recognizing the divinity of Jesus is not just about how we see his life on earth, but it also means we can look at the things Jesus says and does, and understand what God is really like. Jesus reveals God’s nature! (And as it turns out, what Jesus reveals about God is good news!)
2. Jesus deeply loves humanity,
without exception.
The four gospels (the books describing Jesus’s life) show him to be a person full of love and compassion. His love often crossed boundaries, extending to people who were considered outcasts in their society. And while Jesus often had stern warnings for those who abused their authority and took advantage of others, his love even extended to those who were his enemies. Jesus loves people—including you!
Jesus embraces us as we are, and in that embrace leads us towards goodness and wholeness. The love of Jesus—in which we are created, saved, and reborn—is the most powerful force in the cosmos, the driving force behind all that is! It is what makes Jesus the perfect Savior!
3. Jesus was unjustly killed by crucifixion, but God raised him from the dead.
Central to Jesus’s story is his unjust execution by the Roman Empire—followed by his resurrection. Jesus was born into a world with a constant power struggle and an uneasy peace forged by the heavy and violent hand of the Roman Empire. When Jesus became a threat to the power of his people’s religious leaders, they leveraged those tensions and manipulated the power of the empire to have him killed; He was executed as a rebel by crucifixion, even though he was innocent and had no desire to incite a political rebellion.
Astonishingly, after he was killed, God raised him from the dead, and his resurrection was witnessed by many people. From those early witnesses, the church was born—a community of people who give allegiance to Jesus.
Following his resurrection, Jesus ascended to heaven, enthroned as the true Lord of the cosmos.
4. Jesus teaches humanity a new way of life!
Jesus was a teacher. He taught his first followers a new way of life, and those teachings still radically reshape the way we connect to God, how we treat other people, and how we think of ourselves. Jesus’s teachings are challenging, provocative, and powerful. Jesus teaches us to love our neighbors and even our enemies, to abandon hypocrisy and pretense, to live generously, and much more.
Jesus’s teachings compel any community that would live by them to abandon the destructive ways that humanity assumes are inevitable—and even normal. They open up a new way.
5. Jesus will return to set things right.
We believe Jesus’s story isn’t over. Jesus is alive, and enthroned with God the Father in heaven. Jesus sees what happens on earth, and is fully aware of the state of humanity and our lives here on earth. Jesus knows we live in an unjust world, and the harm we do to each other and even ourselves. We believe that someday there will be a reckoning for all that. Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead, and to complete his work of making all things new. That may look like the world getting flipped upside down to us, but in the end, we trust that Jesus’s judgement will make things right.
As people who have given our allegiance to Jesus, we don’t fear that day. We trust in his grace, and have bound ourselves to his cause. We look forward to being united with him, and seeing his work in us completed!
