AUG 23 2026 | Elijah: From Drought to Downpour S2E1 | Cave Time

Sea Change Church · Elijah: From Drought to Downpour S2E1 · "Cave Time" Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · August 23, 2026 1 Kings 19:1–8 We just came out of a twelve week series on the vision of our church, capped by four weeks called "The Church Has Left the Building." If you walked out of that a little exhausted, feeling like you've got so much going on and how can you possibly do more, I want to give you a word of grace: there is a time for rest. I'm not asking you to go be Mother Teresa and find some brand new area of ministry. There are already people in your regular life you can care for.

So coming out of a series that was all "let's get activated, let's change the world, let's go do stuff for Jesus," that needs to be balanced with the sacredness of solitude and rest. We live in a world that doesn't know how to rest. Whatever you think about AI and where it's headed, I've not seen it resting on the seventh day, but God himself did. Jesus regularly pulled away. Without rest, without silence, without being comfortable in solitude somewhere in your life on a regular basis, you will not have spiritual formation. You will have spiritual deformation. We want to be a church that forms you to know who Jesus is and to meet him in that place, and that's where this series begins.

If you haven't heard season one of Elijah, here's the quick version. Elijah shows up in the courts of the king, and the three main characters are Elijah, Ahab, and Jezebel. Israel had been divided into two kingdoms, Judah in the south and Israel in the north, and God was upset with the direction Israel was taking toward other gods. God sends Elijah to say a drought is coming, three years with not a drop of rain, and Ahab does not like it. Prophets who tell the truth rarely get a warm welcome from kings who don't want to hear it. Elijah delivers the word and then disappears. God sends him to hide by the brook Cherith, where he is fed by ravens for three years while God cares for him and pours into him.

When he comes out of that hidden season, he meets the prophets of Baal on top of Mount Carmel for a showdown. Wet wood, an altar, and a challenge: whichever God answers with fire is the real one. The prophets of Baal cry out all day, cutting themselves, getting nothing. Elijah mocks them, wondering out loud if their god is busy or asleep. Then Elijah steps up, calls down the fire of God, and it falls and consumes the altar. He puts the prophets of Baal to the sword. That's where season one ended. Ahab goes home and tells Jezebel everything Elijah did. Jezebel sends Elijah a message: by this time tomorrow, your life will be like the life of the prophets you killed.

And here's where chapter 19 opens, where we pick up for this second season. "Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, 'So may the gods do to me and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.' Then he was afraid, and he arose and ran for his life, and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there." He goes a day's journey further into the wilderness, sits down under a broom tree, and asks God to let him die: "It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers." He falls asleep under the tree.

An angel touches him and says, "Arise and eat." There is a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water waiting for him. He eats, drinks, and lies back down. The angel of the LORD comes a second time and says, "Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you." He eats again, and in the strength of that food he walks forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mountain of God. There's an interesting parallel here to Jesus going into the desert. The first time Elijah went into the wilderness, God led him there. This time, he runs there out of fear. Jesus was led into the desert by the Holy Spirit.

What I really love about this story is that instead of chastising Elijah for running in fear from Jezebel, God sends an angel to touch him. That's a lot of grace. We often disqualify ourselves the moment we feel like we've failed. We go back to old habits, old distractions, and then in the middle of it we assume God has abandoned us or doesn't want anything to do with us until we've cleaned ourselves up. Romans says the opposite: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. God still sends angels to us when we fail. And this is a failure, but it's also burnout. Elijah just had a huge, euphoric experience on Carmel, and a lot of great failure happens right after great success.

Where do you go after an output like that, after you get the job, sell the house, build the company? The one thing Elijah knew to do was go somewhere safe. He crosses a border into territory Israel doesn't control, finds a broom tree, and it's bad enough there that he has suicidal thoughts. It's worth noticing that when Jesus went into the wilderness, he fasted forty days and forty nights. Elijah isn't called to fast. God sends him food instead, so he can be sustained, and that food carries him forty days and forty nights. So here's the frame I want you to sit with: solitude, even when you didn't arrive there for the right reasons, when it's committed to God and found with God in the middle of it, because Elijah is still talking to God, will give you sustenance and strength.

You only have so much capacity, even with all the tools and knowledge we keep being handed. So my question is, where is your Cherith? Where is your broom tree? Where is the place you meet with the Spirit? I regularly pray this passage over people, because I believe angels still touch people and strengthen them. I ask God on a regular basis, especially for the sick, the aged, and those in deep illness, that he would send an angel to touch them. It's a simple note, but it's biblical: ask God to send angels to do the work of the kingdom. One more thing about this passage before we move to the big idea.

When God sent Elijah something, he ate the food God sent him. I know that when I've struggled, I go looking for a distraction instead. Even when God gives me an answer, I'd rather live in my distraction than eat the food he's actually given me. I think some of our failure in the hardest moments comes from not wanting to eat the food God has given us, because we'd rather have the food of distraction, of satiation, whatever our particular go-to happens to be. I did a memorial service yesterday for a man in our church, and as I spoke about the twenty-third Psalm, I realized all of us are shepherded by something.

When you go into silence, into solitude, you quickly become aware of what shepherds you. It'll call to you. We live in a world that says distract, distract, distract, and it has given us the shiny gateway to hell sitting right in our pocket. But there's an entire world that is disconnected from all of that, happening beyond the connected world. The sun rises every day. The wind blows. We miss it because we keep running to the easy fixes. Here's the big idea: before Elijah was a man of fire, he was a man of solitude. If you want to be a person of fire, you need to be a person of solitude first.

Jesus was a person of solitude, regularly drawing away and finding his strength there. Without that gear in your life, that hidden place where you can sit with the Lord and be still and know that he is God, you will have a deformed spirituality. Not zero formation, just greatly deformed. Season one ended with fire. Season two begins with silence. Elijah encountered God at the altar, but he was formed by God in the hidden places. Blaise Pascal, one of the great minds of the last few centuries, wrote this: "All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber." By chamber he meant room.

I was talking with an abbot this week, a man who has spent forty years in a monastery, and I asked him about being alone. He told me, "If you do not have a deep understanding that you are the beloved of God, solitude will eat you alive." You can detox from your phone in forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Get away, turn everything off, and you'll start seeing things you don't normally see. On average, a person's screen time over ten years adds up to roughly two and a half years of life. It's finding this place of belovedness in that solitude that changes everything. So here's the first point: withdraw, get away from the noise.

This goes back to 1 Kings 17, from season one, before any of the chapter 19 crisis ever happened. "And the word of the LORD came to him: 'Depart from here and turn eastward and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. You shall drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.'" All of us are drinking from some brook. All of us are being fed by something, and it could be good things, relationships, a health routine, but there are also things we get fed by regularly that bring toxicity into our soul. The question I keep coming back to, especially in the age of our phones, is how much of this is poisoning the well I drink from.

I've been taking news headlines, running them through a search engine, and asking it to rewrite the story from the opposite perspective, then reading it that way. It's eye opening how easily we get poisoned by headlines alone. I turned off the news for four days this week. No headlines, no Instagram. When I finally opened the headlines back up, I felt an actual dopamine rush, the same jolt you'd get from two espresso shots after a week without coffee. I didn't realize how much that was affecting everything I do. What is poisoning your well, and where are you drinking from? God intentionally led Elijah away, and the Spirit wants to lead you into the wilderness too, not alone, but with him, so you can do what John 14 calls abiding.

I've been challenging our Gen Z group with this: can you sit with Jesus without your Bible, without your phone, without your worship playlist, without even your prayer list, for thirty minutes? Just sit with him. Every time your mind wanders to the next thing you want, bring it back: I'm here to spend time with you, Jesus. I want to know you. The last time I said that from this stage, several of you came up afterward and told me you'd never thought about just sitting with God without praying or reading. My own spiritual director asked me recently how my prayer life was going, and I told him it was rough right now.

He told me to reboot it: three minutes a day, just sitting and being with God. I'm a performance guy, so three minutes felt almost insulting at first. It's turned out to be the best three minutes of my day. Jesus practiced this same rhythm. Luke 5:15 and 16 say, "But now even more the report about him went abroad, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities. But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray." The fire of God fell on the altar at Carmel, but the furnace of God's refining fire was found at Cherith. When Elijah was struggling, he went back to silence, back to being with God.

We have to become a generation that can sit with Jesus and know we don't have to be perfect to be accepted by him, that we are the beloved in every part of our lives, not just the parts we've already sorted out. I asked myself this week whether five year old Adam knows he's the beloved of God. My first answer was yes, because I've done plenty of that self-work in my twenties, thirties, and forties. My spiritual director pushed back. He didn't ask about my twenties and thirties. He asked about the boy dealing with his parents' divorce. There are seasons of my life where I don't remember feeling the presence of God, and sitting in silence is what gives you the ability to actually go back and face those places honestly.

The final point is this: be still, and stop producing. I know you still have to go to work and to the grocery store. But so much of our drive comes from finding our worth in what we produce. It's easy, especially in ministry, to look at attendance numbers and think that's how we're winning. It isn't. Whether there are four of you in a room or a thousand, being formed to look more like Jesus is what actually matters. So the question is, when are you still? When are you not producing anything? Elijah had just won the biggest fight of his life at Carmel. You'd think the next move would be to go take another mountain.

Instead he runs. Jesus had crowds gathering everywhere he went, and whenever the crowd built up, he would slip away, and his disciples would go looking for him. He wasn't interested in creating and doing. He was interested in being. If your worth is built on your output, you'll know it, because you'll lose your peace the moment you're not doing enough, and you won't know how to turn it off. Spiritual activity is not the same as spiritual health. So here's the takeaway: find your cave. Find your Cherith. Find that place, and this week, take thirty minutes alone. No phone, no music, no podcast, no agenda. Then do the Psalm 46:10 thing: "Be still, and know that I am God." Most people stop there, but the verse keeps going: "I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth." There's a theology in parts of the church that says if we just move enough, minister enough, run hard enough after God, we'll change the nations.

This verse says the opposite. Be still, know that I am God, and I will be exalted. That has to be formed out of a place of solitude and silence, a place where you're comfortable sitting with Jesus and know that you are his beloved. The moment you get quiet, the enemy will start listing every failure, every regret, every place you fell short. Jesus wants to settle in beside you in that silence and remind you that you were created for more than your output, that he simply wants to be with you. As we start this series and become a church that goes out and cares for our neighbors, all of that has to be grounded first in the furnace of his refining fire, in solitude and silence.

There's a theological truth worth sitting with here: every word about God has a limit, because you can only understand as much as language can carry. Silence has no such limit. That's why he says, "Be still, and know that I am God." You can know things about God through words, but the only way to know God without limitation is to sit with him in silence. The enemy's main strategy is to keep us distracted and engaged so we never discover that we are God's beloved in the quiet.