Sea Change Sermons

Back from sabbatical, Pastor Harry opens with the proposition that where you sit matters, and proves it with a sophomore algebra class taught by someone who did not teach — a teacher whose strategy was the telephone in the corner and the occasional shouted dismissal.

Ephesians 2 says believers are raised with Christ and seated with him. Harry keeps asking why. Was the cross not enough? Was the Spirit not enough? Why a seat in the highest place as well?

Verse 7 answers it, and his paraphrase is blunt: so God can show off. So that in the coming ages he might display the immeasurable riches of his grace — children of wrath redeemed, made alive, and seated, with all of heaven looking at the handiwork.

Which sets up the line worth keeping. You will use none of your strength to earn God's love and none of your skill to keep it, because it is a gift. And you will use every strength and skill you have to participate in it.

Verse 10 supplies the participation: good works prepared in advance. Harry's point is that being seated is a position of authority, and that the modern church badly underestimates what it is therefore able to do.

The question he was asked twice while away, which he takes as a sign, he passes on: what would you be doing for the glory of God if you knew it would not fail?

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Elliott Stearns begins with a Hemingway story. A father takes out a newspaper advertisement in Madrid for his estranged son Paco — meet me, all is forgiven — and eight hundred young men named Paco come to the meeting place.

What makes the story land is the life behind it. Hemingway was close to his father as a boy, hunting and fishing; the relationship hardened as the household grew stricter, and his father died by suicide in 1928. Elliott's reading is that what was really killed that day was a son's hope of ever being reconciled. Hemingway never found the Father he might have had, and died the same way in 1961.

So the message is about fatherhood, and what a father actually supplies: identity and direction, provision, protection.

The turn is in Isaiah 9. Elliott points out that the titles there are the names people gave Jesus when they saw what he did — wonderful counsellor for the Sermon on the Mount, mighty God for the miracles — and then stops on everlasting Father.

He admits he once thought the highest calling was apostle, and says plainly that he no longer does. The higher calling is to learn to be a father, with a heart beating in time with the Father's.

The invitation at the end is specific. He asks the prayer team to hug anyone who comes forward, as a small enactment of the father in the parable who runs down the road.

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Walking With a Limp | Elijah: Drought to Downpour – S1E6
Pastor Adam Stadtmiller | Sea Change Church | Sept. 21, 2025

How long will you waver between two opinions? In 1 Kings 18, Elijah confronts Israel’s divided heart on Mount Carmel, calling them to stop “limping” between loyalties and choose who they will serve. God is searching for people who walk with undivided allegiance, not half-hearted devotion.

🙏 Big Idea: God is searching for people who don’t limp between loyalties, but live in solitary allegiance to Him.

📖 Scripture Reference:
1 Kings 18:17–21

📝 Key Themes:

Ahab's first words on seeing Elijah are an accusation: is it you, you troubler of Israel? Pastor Adam's first point comes straight out of that. When sin blinds a person, the prophet starts to look like the problem.

The question he turns on the room is gentler. What has gone blurry because your attention has been somewhere else? It is hard to look in two directions at once.

Which is the second point, and the one the title comes from. Elijah asks how long the people will go limping between two opinions, and they say nothing at all. The silence is the answer. Adam sets that against the end of the same chapter, where Elijah outruns chariots at full stride — one man running, a nation limping.

The illustration arrives via a plane to England in 2005 and a conversation with a rapper wearing a baseball cap. Asked whether he supported the team, the answer was essentially no — the hat was the point. Adam liked it enough to copy it, and it becomes the picture of allegiance worn as accessory, swapped as convenient.

He brings in Yeats on a nation that stops listening to its prophets — the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity — and connects it directly: divided allegiance makes conviction almost impossible.

He admits he has been ricocheting himself lately, and had to drop into a lower gear to get clarity back.

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Sermon by Pastor Adam.

Sermon By Pastor Adam.

Elijah is the headline, but this week belongs to a civil servant. Obadiah runs Ahab's household — the worst administration in Israel's history — and the text says he feared the Lord greatly. When Jezebel began killing prophets, he hid a hundred of them fifty at a time in caves and kept them fed.

Pastor Adam notes the second half of that. He did not simply hide them and wish them luck; he sustained them, at ongoing risk, with supplies he had to get from somewhere.

Three things are required to live in an Ahab world, and the third is the honest one. Character — feared the Lord greatly, not a little. Courage that costs something, for which the modern parallel offered is a man who spent decades driving Bibles into countries that did not want them. And doubt, because Obadiah's immediate response to Elijah is not obedience but an argument about how this will get him killed.

Adam treats that as permission rather than failure. Faith that has nothing to overcome is not faith; it is a foregone conclusion.

The practice he passes on came from something he was reading that week: do not push through a feeling, actually feel it and name it. He did the exercise on himself and names what came up — loneliness, a fear of abandonment — acknowledged rather than argued with, then handed over.

He also describes letting his children stand in front of a crucifix at a museum as young as six, and simply letting them take it in.

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Pastors Adam and Joshua dive a little deeper into last weeks message on Elijah as well as discuss the ethical implications of churches using AI. We also highlight some events and chat about our latest release from Sea Change Music.

The brook has dried up, and God's next instruction is worse than the last one. Go to Zarephath — in Sidon, Jezebel's home territory — where a widow has been commanded to feed you. When Elijah finds her she is gathering sticks to cook a final meal for herself and her son before they die.

Pastor Adam works two points. God is sovereign over the path, and God's provision is sovereign, surprising and sufficient.

On sovereignty he notes what marks every turn in Elijah's story: then the word of the Lord came to him. The pivots are not clever, they are heard. And on discernment he offers a rule of thumb — when something is God's will it tends to be zero or a hundred, not a coin toss.

The hard part of the passage is what Elijah asks for. Make me a little cake first, and then feed yourself and your son. Adam reads it as first fruits, and is careful about where that lands: the obligation was removed at the cross, the blessing was not. He grants openly that he manages to annoy people in both directions on this.

The detail he lingers on is the shape of the provision. The flour and oil never ran out, and never overflowed. Enough, daily, for as long as it was needed.

The image he leaves is navigational — a man who escaped a prison camp and found his way by Orion and the North Star. You are never lost if you can see the sky. Look up.

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What does it take to be a change maker in a broken world?
In God’s Change Maker, Pastor Adam Stadtmiller begins a new series on Elijah, a prophet who stepped into a time of spiritual famine and confronted idolatry head-on. Elijah’s story reminds us that God often uses ordinary, fragile people to bring extraordinary change. Bold yet breakable, Elijah shows us what it means to disrupt the darkness, stand for truth, and trust God’s power when the odds are against us.

To support this ministry and help us continue to reach people with the gospel, click here: https://ljcf.churchsuite.com/donate/

📖 Scripture References:
1 Kings 16:29–17:1
James 5:17
Malachi 4:5–6
Luke 1:17
Matthew 17:1–3