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Welcome to Day 2204 of Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me. This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom What Does God Want – God Joined His Human Family – Daily Wisdom Putnam Church Message – 02/12/2023 What Does God Want? -  God Joined His Human Family   Last week, we continued our series with the overall theme, which is 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’s message was a high-level overview of the history of Israel,/ God’s 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.   Christians 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. Jesus 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.   There’s More To Jesus Than The Nativity or the Cross The 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’s family in John 3:16-17 16 “For this is how God loved the world: He gave[a] his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. 17 God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him. In other words, when most Christians think about Jesus, they have the cross in mind. That misses something.   The fact that God became a man in Jesus gets a little lost in focusing on the cross. Most Christians don’t 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.   The hope that human beings could still one day be with God forever was kept alive by God’s 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’s children rejected him at nearly every turn. It’s as though every time God said, “You can still be with me—believe that...