Although He was a Son, He learned obedience through what He suffered. (Hebrews 5:8)

Note: This sermon was preached in the midst of a long summer heat wave which afflicted much of the nation.

In the early 1960s in the deep South, when the backlash against the civil rights movement got especially severe and the violence of white racists got especially brutal, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a packed church one night and said, "We have entered into a season of suffering." Scripture says that "To everything there is a season" (Eccleasiastes 3:1), and sometimes it is true in life that the season is one for suffering.

I've often thought of Dr. King's phrase during the summertime, not in terms of injustice or persecution, but in terms of the weather! Doesn't it seem in recent years that summers hav…