Sea Change Sermons

Having just confronted a king, Elijah is told to hide. Pastor Adam finds that genuinely strange and refuses to smooth it over: the word of the Lord came, and the instruction was to disappear.

Three words carry the message. Separation, solitude, sustenance. The brook is called Cherith, from a root meaning to cut off, and Adam draws the obvious implication — God does not only anoint people to speak; sometimes he appoints them to be silent. Luke has Jesus doing the same thing, withdrawing to lonely places on purpose.

This is not a retreat from danger. God is not worried about Ahab. The point is that God intends to be the hiding place.

So the question becomes where a person is actually sustained. By emotions, by other people's words, by their expectations — or by the word of the Lord. He suggests some people need a season of rest, and others need to stay exactly where they are, and that the difference is not a matter of preference.

He borrows a line about no longer having time to argue with people who have already decided to disagree, and applies it to message boards and the pull to reply.

The caution is against pulling back on generosity or time out of self-protection. He says God has never let him down, and separates that carefully from disappointment, which he has felt plenty of.

Then verse 7: the brook dries up.

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New sermon series!!

Elijah arrives in scripture with no introduction. No genealogy, no calling narrative, no appointment — he simply walks into the court of the worst king Israel has had and announces that it will not rain until he says so.

Pastor Adam opens the series with the word he wants attached to the whole thing: change maker. A kingdom catalyst who disrupts darkness and advances God's reign, and his claim is that every person listening has a micro-community where that is their job.

The setting explains the urgency. Around 874 BC, a hundred years after David, the united kingdom has split. Ahab has out-sinned every king before him, married into Baal worship, and built the altar. Israel is not choosing another god so much as keeping both. Elijah's own name is the counter-argument: my God is Yahweh.

Adam previews the whole arc — the ravens, the widow, Carmel, and then the collapse under the broom tree, which he flags now so nobody mistakes the man for a superhero. James calls him a man just like us.

On prophecy he sets a test: any prophet announcing doom without calling people back to repentance should be treated with suspicion. Repentance is what brings the rain.

The personal note is about generosity, and how often he feels the pull to quietly scale it back. He keeps deciding not to. The ravens keep showing up — there are three of them living around the church, and his wife feeds them.

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Pastor Jim Smith brings a seed packet to the pulpit because he cannot resist an object lesson. Blossoming lettuce, which his wife will plant; he notes she has two green thumbs and he simply has thumbs.

The parable of the sower gets turned from a diagnosis into a question, and it is the one he asked students for seventeen years: what quality and depth of soil do you want to offer? Not which soil are you — which will you choose to be.

Each soil gets its due. Hard ground is not a verdict. He tells of a physician whose ground was broken open by a few gentle words from people he could not explain, and who went from there to reading Lewis and eventually to saying yes for himself.

Rocky ground receives the word genuinely and shallowly, and fails when the heat arrives, because nothing went down far enough to find water.

Thorns he calls entanglements, and treats them as something that can be prayed over and sorted rather than simply endured — a life set back into its proper order and sequence.

He closes on the word sacrament, and what it meant before it meant anything ecclesiastical. Sacramentum: a vow of loyalty. Communion is offered as a chance to make or renew one.

He also keeps a promise to finish twenty minutes past the hour, and says so.

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Are you ready to respond to God's “now”?
In The Power of Now, Pastor Adam Stadtmiller dives into the meaning of kairos—God’s appointed, opportune time. These moments aren’t just holy interruptions—they’re divine invitations. But kairos moments are easily missed if we're too busy managing the clock (chronos). When the Kingdom of God is at hand, how will you respond?

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📖 Scripture References:
Mark 1:14–15
Galatians 4:4
Luke 19:44
2 Corinthians 6:1–2
Luke 8 (Woman with the issue of blood)
Mark 10 (The Rich Young Ruler)

John has just been arrested, and that is when Jesus starts. Pastor Adam notices the sequence: the bad news is the hinge, and the sentence that follows it is the time is fulfilled, the kingdom is at hand.

Three things about kairos. It is when God is nearest — Galatians puts Jesus arriving not late, not early, but in the fullness of time. It is easily missed, usually by people busy managing their calendars. And it asks for an answer: repent and believe is a response, not a mood.

The line he keeps returning to is that you do not drift into obedience, you decide yourself into it. Two examples from the Gospels sit on either side — the woman who reached through a crowd and took hold of her moment, and the young man who had one and walked away.

For anyone who thinks they have already missed theirs, he offers the reroute. We give Google Maps more credit for getting us somewhere after a wrong turn than we give God.

And then the reframing that turns the whole message over. The reason God wants you in step is not that the work needs you or cannot be done without you. It is that he wants your company while he does it. The moment most worth not missing is the walk itself.

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Are you living on God’s clock—or just watching the time pass?
In TikTok, Pastor Adam Stadtmiller launches a new series about aligning your life with God's timing. We often wait for breakthrough moments (Kairos), but God does some of His deepest work in the ordinary, daily rhythm of life (Chronos). Faithfulness in the small moments prepares us for the divine appointments ahead. Stay awake. Stay ready. Keep the lights on.

To support this ministry and help us continue to reach people with the gospel, click here: http://www.seachange.church/give

📖 Scripture References:
1 Thessalonians 5:1–6
Ephesians 2:10

A new series opens on the two Greek words for time. Chronos is the measured, sequential kind — the calendar, the commute, the ordinary week. Kairos is the opportune moment, the breakthrough. Pastor Adam's argument is that almost everyone wants the second and almost nobody wants to do the first.

His image is agricultural and unforgiving. People want harvest seasons without fallow seasons, planting seasons or tending seasons. He compares it to fruit picked three weeks early and gassed into ripeness — it looks the part and has nothing in it.

So chronos is preparation for kairos, and the instruction is to be faithful in it. He points at his wife's years as a stay-at-home mother — fingers under the bathroom door, the same rooms cleaned again — while he was travelling and speaking, and says without qualification that what she was doing mattered in those moments.

The practical turn is to audit your own week for soft spots. He names his own: late afternoon after work, and the stretch before an increasingly early bedtime.

The urgency comes from the news — several public figures who died that week, one of them on stage a fortnight earlier. Moments arrive without checking whether anyone is ready.

The third instruction is to keep the lights on: stay connected to the source, keep the word fuelling the flame, walk in obedience. Rick Warren's line sits under it — preparation precedes blessing.

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What does authentic religion look like?
In this message from our Stormproof series, Pastor Adam Stadtmiller teaches from James 1:26–27, reminding us that true religion isn’t about empty rituals—it’s about taming our tongues, caring for those in need, and living lives unstained by the world. Authentic faith is faith in action, showing up for others with love and integrity.

To support this ministry and help us continue to share the hope of Jesus, click here: http://www.seachange.church/give

James 1:26-27. Pure religion is looking after widows and orphans and keeping oneself unstained — religion as practice rather than as a bridle for the tongue only.