AUDIO: Readings & Sermon for Wednesday March 20, 2024

EMPTY WORDS (from the bulletin)
You are daily assailed by empty words: idle small talk, advertising
slogans, and news reports that play on your fears. Political and business
leaders spew cant, clichés, and spin. Perhaps even your friends and family
get in on the act, betraying you with flattery and falsehoods. King David
was only too familiar with such afflictions: “When one comes to see me,” he
said, “he utters empty words, while his heart gathers iniquity; when he
goes out, he tells it abroad” (Psalm 41:6). Our Lord’s powerful Word was
David’s refuge from vain and malicious talk. It is your refuge too. In
Baptism, Jesus Christ has lifted you out of the verbal cesspool and placed
you firmly on the rock of His Word. That Word is never empty, but it shall
accomplish that which He purposes for you.

View the Bulletin for Wednesday, March 20, 2024
2:00 p.m. - Worship Service with Communion
2:30 p.m. - 30 min. Bible Study “MIGHT” follow the 2:00 p.m. service
7:00 p.m. - Worship Service with Communion
All are welcome, bring a friend, neighbor or relative

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First Reading -- Jeremiah 9:12-16
Who is the man so wise that he can understand this? To whom has the mouth of the Lord spoken, that he may declare it? Why is the land ruined and laid waste like a wilderness, so that no one passes through? And the Lord says: “Because they have forsaken My law that I set before them, and have not obeyed My voice or walked in accord with it, but have stubbornly followed their own hearts and have gone after the Baals, as their fathers taught them. Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will feed this people with bitter food, and give them poisonous water to drink. I will scatter them among the nations whom neither they nor their fathers have known, and I will send the sword after them, until I have consumed them.” 

Second Reading -- 2 Timothy 3:1–9 
But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith. But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was that of those two men. 

Third Reading -- Matthew 26:1–5 
When Jesus had finished all these sayings, He said to His disciples, “You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified.” 

Then the chief priests and the elders of the people gathered in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, and plotted together in order to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill Him. But they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar among the people.”