BROADCASTS.com

Welcome to Day 2204 of Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.\nThis is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom\nWhat Does God Want \u2013 God Joined His Human Family \u2013 Daily Wisdom\nPutnam Church Message \u2013 02/12/2023\nWhat Does God Want? -\xa0 God Joined His Human Family\nLast week, we continued our series with the overall theme to answer the question: What does God want? The answer we discovered over this past month was that God wants you and everyone who will ever live. In other words, God wanted a human family. God wants co-workers to take care of His creation. God wants you to know who you are and why your life has value to him. He loves you and desires that you also love Him. Last week\u2019s message was a high-level overview of the history of Israel, God\u2019s chosen people from the Exodus out of Egypt through the return from exile in Babylon. We learned that even though God was betrayed by His family, he still loved them and pursued them. There was only one solution left. God would have to become one of us to have the human family he desired and loved. That is precisely what happened. Today, we will see that God Joined His Human Family.\n\nChristians know all about the coming of Jesus. They know he was miraculously birthed by Mary, a young girl who was a virgin (Matt 1:18-25). The broader culture is even familiar with the image of this baby.\n\nJesus in the manger, especially in Christmas decorations and nativity sets. Several old but popular Christmas songs celebrate how Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies about a messiah.\n\nThere\u2019s More to Jesus than the Nativity or the Cross\n\nThe entire focus is typically on Jesus being born into the world to eventually die on the cross. He would be the means of forgiveness for our sins and, thus, our passage back into God\u2019s family in John 3:16-17,\xa0\u201cFor this is how God loved the world: He gave\xa0his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.\xa0God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.\u201d In other words, when most Christians think about Jesus, they have the cross in mind. That misses something.\n\nThe fact that God became a man in Jesus gets a little lost in focusing on the cross. Most Christians don\u2019t realize that it was necessary for God to become a human for many reasons: to fulfill all the Old Testament covenants and overturn the results of the supernatural rebellions we discussed two weeks ago.\n\nThe hope that human beings could still one day be with God forever was kept alive by God\u2019s refusal to eliminate humanity or scrap His plan. He kept returning to humanity, offering them forgiveness and a relationship with him. God wanted them to believe and show they believed by living in harmony with him and each other. But God\u2019s children rejected him at nearly every turn. It\u2019s as though every time God said, \u201cYou can still be with me\u2014believe that and then show me where your heart is,\u201d the problem worsened. The Bible uses the analogy of wandering sheep with no shepherd to describe this propensity in the Old and New Testaments Isaiah 53:6, \u201cAll of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God\u2019s paths to follow our own. Yet the\xa0Lord\xa0laid on him\xa0the sins of us all.\u201d Matthew \xa09:36 says,...