Jesus Offers Us Rest - (and a real-life supernatural experience) Episode #194

The Burt (Not Ernie) Show

Hey there! Hello and welcome to this episode of The Burt (Not Ernie) Show…getting the promises of God into the hearts and minds of the people of God, which is right where they belong. So thankful you’re listening to this episode of the show, and hey, today we’re looking at a promise directly from the New Testament words of Jesus, and it’s a good one. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you may want to just save this episode and plan to share it somewhere, or with somebody, because it’s gonna get really real really fast and really bring it today. God’s promises are true - let’s talk about how they’re true for you today.

You’re listening to The Burt (Not Ernie) Show, part of the Spark Network, which can be found via the Edifi app. Today’s episode is sponsored by the Psalm 91 audio Bible study & prayer sessions, created by the show host (that’s me), Jan L. Burt. Access the study at JanLBurt.com/psalm91 Psalm 91 is perhaps the most astounding passage of promises with the most astounding miracles linked to it of maybe the entire Old Testament, and for sure it is one of the most amazing and life-changing passages in the Bible. It’s something you should know and pray over yourself and your loved ones, because it holds promises that we find only in this passage, and it is something every believer needs to apply to their life - and that’s why I created the Psalm 91 audio Bible study. JanLBurt.com/psalm91 and this is episode number 194.

Alrighty, so let’s jump right into this.

I’ll be reading from the Amplified today, looking at a few verses from the book of Matthew, chapter 11.

Matthew 11:28-30 Amplified Bible

28 “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavily burdened [by religious rituals that provide no peace], and I will give you rest [refreshing your souls with salvation]. 29 Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me [following Me as My disciple], for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest (renewal, blessed quiet) for your souls. 30 For My yoke is easy [to bear] and My burden is light.”

That’s from Matthew 11, verses 28-30.

We’ve got a call here, something we need to do, our part is to come to Jesus. Who is it He is calling to come to Him? Those who are weary, those who are heavily burdened, dealing with religious rituals that provide no peace…and hey, there are many things that fall into that category, so don’t automatically assume this doesn’t apply to you because it really might, and Jesus has freedom for you. Today, He has freedom for you from religious systems and programs and rituals that don’t give you the kind of peace that Jesus wants you to have. And when we do as Jesus asks us to, calls us to, and come to Him, He promises (verse 28 says WILL and when He says He will do something, He will!) He will give you rest. The Lord’s salvation is restful, is peaceful, for you and for me. We can have been in the Chirstian world for so long that we begin to lose our rest, our peace. That is not what Jesus wants, my friend. From day one of your salvation to day done of your salvation, when He takes you home or when He returns and you are caught up in the air to meet Him, whatever your day done might look like, Jesus wants you to have peace and a refreshed soul, rest like literal rest in every aspect of life, in every sense of the word, on every single day that you walk with Him. This isn’t something we share with people when we are talking to them about Jesus, but we no longer have it as part of our daily life. It’s meant to be lived, this walk of faith and lived well - lived on Jesus’s terms and this verse tells us that His terms are trading our weariness and heavy burdened way of life for rest, peace, and refreshed souls. And while it might sound too good to be true, it’s actually 100 percent true. God’s promises are what, now? True. Always and in all ways.

He calls us to take His yoke upon ourselves and learn from Him - that literally means to just follow Him as His disciple. I say JUST, but I don’t say there’s never any struggle to do this. The world, our flesh, social media, old and new friends, our workplaces, even our families and sad to say often our church culture is too worldly, too focused on programs or not being a Christian weirdo, or seeker friendly or all that stuff (a subject for another day, but not biblical, not sustainable, and not discipleship…just sayin’!) All these things and more can make it tricky to keep following Jesus as His disciple. But when we stay yoked to Him and don’t pull and tug and fight that yoke, just walk with Him at His pace and His leading doing life His way, well then, that’s discipleship and we have His promised peace and rest, and it is just so good.

Now if you’ve been walking with the Lord for a while, can I ask you to pause for a moment (maybe pause this podcast for a second and think on this) and just remember what it was like for you before you responded to Jesus’ call when He rescued you and saved you and forgave and turned your life around in a good way. Can you remember what it was like? The stress, the fear, the anger or other emotions, the control you maybe tried to exert on situations and people, the overwhelm, the way your did all those things you didn’t want to do, your hard heart, the lack of hope, the lack of joy, the lack of peace, afraid of all the things, uneasy, tossed around by life - do you remember? And if you have not yet made the decision to follow Jesus as His disciple, can I just tell you that right now is a great time to make that decision? It’s super simple, there is no required prayer to pray, you can just talk to God and tell Him you’re sick of your sin, sick of life like this, and you want what Jesus offers, peace and eternal life and total forgiveness for every single sin, past, present and future, and just ask Him to be Lord of your life, to forgive you of all your sins, and to take up reign on the throne of your heart. Thank Him, and believe it is done, and it is so long as you mean it. It really is that simple. Just talk to the Lord, invite Him into your life, your heart, and thank Him and say Amen, so be it, yes Lord. He doesn’t make it hard, because He is a good God and He loves you too much to make it too hard to make Jesus Lord of your life.

So, remembering what it was like before you made Him Lord, your hard knock life, and that’s the true reality for everyone who doesn’t walk with Jesus as His disciple (not about a program for six weeks at church, about discipleship for all the rest of your days!). And now think about what it’s like to have that peace, to take His yoke upon you and learn from Him, knowing He is gentle and humble in heart and that He brings you rest for your soul. Rest for your soul. This isn’t just a nap. It’s REST for your inner being, for your soul. Soul rests is next level. It’s truly supernatural, it is not of this world. It’s from the Lord. And it’s life changing. You need it. Jesus has it for you. And that’s just one smidgen of the promises from this passage alone! Soul rest. His yoke is easy to bear and His burden is light.

You are not going to be weighed down and having a come apart when you are His disciple. That’s not your life, because it’s not His will based on Matthew 11, verse 28 through 30. You do need to believe that this is all true for you, because when we believe, our faith is accredited to us as righteousness, and Jesus often said that it would be done to those who asked something of Him, it would be done to them according to their faith, to their belief. So, believe the very words Jesus spoke, don’t do an eye roll and refuse to believe it. Just choose to believe. And it really is a choice. Don’t mind your feelings, but make your feelings mind the Word of God.

Now I’m going to sort of add some zest to this episode. It’s a unique episode of the podcast, because I’m going to share some things I have never spoken about on this platform. Everything I’m sharing today is true, it actually happened, just as I’m telling it. And I know it’s all true because it happened to me. I’m gonna tell ya some things, real life, nitty gritty, stuff. Here goes!

Bizarre and weirded me out experience #1:

Now, first off, let me preface these next couple of snippets I’m sharing from my own life by clearly stating that I was not a follower of Jesus at all at this point in time. Not at all. Not one bit. Zero percent interested in God. I was a train wreck. No Bible in our home, didn’t go to church on Easter or Christmas, just zero of that in my growing up home or in my life.

This event happened when I was a teenager, and I worked as a teen, like many of us, and at this point I was around 18, working for a telemarketing company, more like a call center for customer service stuff than outbound sales calls, but basically telemarketing. I worked second shift, we called it the night shift (only two shifts there, days or nights and I was on nights). I worked in Omaha, Nebraska but lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa, right across the river, actually very normal for the Omaha area, gotta add that piece of info to this true story.

So one afternoon, I went to work as usual, and there was a man at work that I didn’t recognize, not that big of a deal, lots of turnover in a place like that, ya know? He sat in front of my and to my left at his cubicle desk area, and on our lunch break he came and sat at the table I sat at with my normal group of work friends, and back then, I was a smoker…actually started smoking probably around age 13, maybe even sneakily smoking at 12, but smoking with my mom’s permission at 13 (meaning that at that point, when I was 13, we lived in a small town in Nebraska and she gave her permission to all the local stores that I could buy cigarettes there because she’d given me permission to smoke, and am I Gen X, the child of a Boomer? Uh, yes…)

So, I sat at the outside table with the other smokers for my lunch break, and this man sat with us, but he didn’t smoke. He was chatty and said something about working a different shift for this one day and wondered if anybody lived across the river in Iowa and might be able to give him a ride back to the Iowa side after work. I wasn’t naive, I didn’t give rides to men I did not know as an 18-year-old, and you can discern from my being a smoker at age 13 that maybe I was a bit street savvy. So, it was out of the norm for me to say yes to something like this, in fact I cannot think of another time in my life when I gave a ride to a stranger, but everybody seemed like it was okay and of course they knew I lived in Iowa, and they all seemed comfortable with him and I gave him a ride after work.

Now for some reason, the whole drive to the place in Iowa where I dropped him off, I was not comfortable smoking. So, after work, a smoker lights up, that’s just how it is, one of the key smokes of the entire day, honestly, is the after-work smoke. But I didn’t grab my cigarettes. I left them in the side pocket storage area of my baby blue 1988 Chevy Beretta.

On the drive, he was very kind in a way that was super genuine, and he asked questions about my life, started as normal chit chat, but I answered each question and then he’d another one, and some of the questions were really interesting…like he asked about the small town I’d used to live in and what life was like there for me, and I shared things about being a heavy drinker and being in several car accidents where the car was totaled (like, the number of totaled cars I was in over the course of say four years was five, two cars that rolled, one that had a telephone pole fall onto it right where I was sitting, one launched off a dead end at nearly 100 mph, and another accident at around 130 mph that barely stopped before the car hit a large cement culvert). And I kind of chuckled / joked that maybe God was punishing me or maybe even trying to end my life because I was such a terrible person. (Now at this point I had not had a drop of alcohol in around a year and hadn’t really been heavily drinking in 15-18 months, so I was not a raging drunk when I gave this man a ride home after work, but I was weirdly comfortable sharing about the mess that my life was in so many ways, including my heavy drinking and horrible car accidents, four of those totaled being my own cars). So, I made a comment to try and lighten the mood but also to acknowledge that I was a really terrible teenager, and said maybe God was punishing me or trying to even end my life due to my awfulness.

This man looked at me, like really looked at me, and told me that God was not trying to kill me, but that the devil, Satan, was, because if Satan could kill me without me knowing Jesus as Lord and Savior, I’d go to hell. Now I knew I deserved hell, and I knew that was where I was headed…I think it was common knowledge to GenX teens to know that, to understand that. So, the mention of hell didn't shock me, but the idea that Satan was trying to kill me was a totally new concept to me.

He went on to say that God had actually protected me from what Satan wanted to do, and that He was not angry at me, punishing me, but that He loved me and was watching out for me, keeping me from death when I should have been dead many times over.

He just told me that God loved me. And then, we arrived at the place he’d told me to drop him off. Of course it was dark, probably at least 11pm or so, and I parked near a long sidewalk that led to the doorway of this building, I still don’t know what the place was, it kind looked like maybe an apartment building but not a layout I’d seen before, it had kind of a small town hospital feel to it more than apartments, and it looked like not a place someone would live, and the sidewalk leading to the door was pretty well lit, the doors were glass and the hall inside was super well lit, bright white lighting, think hospital lighting, white walls, white ceiling, white tile floor…and I could see all the way down that hallway. He thanked me for the ride, got out of the car, and shut the car door. I reached for my cigarettes, which were in the door panel pocket to my left, and then glanced back to the right, out the passenger side window, and the dude was gone. I mean gone gone.

This sidewalk was long, and lights were shining on it. There was a barren yard on both side, no trees, no shrubs, just super short grass, and nowhere for him to hide. There was nobody in the hallway inside the building. It startled me. I literally jumped, and looked behind my car, out the driver’s side window, the guy was just gone. Once I knew he was not anywhere around, I just drove home.

Went to work the next day and had some questions about what he had said and wanted to make sure he got into his building okay, so I asked my supervisor if he could get a message to that man. My super looked at me like I was nuts. He said no day shift worker had worked the night shift, and when I said, “He worked the whole shift in that cubicle right there, ya know, dark hair, skinny dude, wore faded jeans, brown shoes…that guy, he was right there.” He said nobody had been in that seat the day before, and he had no idea who I was talking about because that didn’t describe any of the day workers.

Now I was feeling really weird.

So, on the lunch break, I asked my friends. “Remember that guy who sat with us yesterday, he didn’t smoke, but he lives in Iowa and needed a ride home, so I gave him a ride? Remember him?” Every single person at the table looked at me like, “Huh?” Nobody remembered this guy. They all said, nobody sat with us yesterday, just us. And a couple of them said they told me bye the night before as I got into my car…they were emphatic that I got into my car alone. Nobody was with me.

Okay, I was in weird town, and they were wondering if I was okay, like what was I talking about? So, I just said something like, Oh, well this is weird… and tried to change the subject. Didn’t work too well, because they really were curious what was going on and I just never mentioned it again.

But I sure did think about it.

A lot.

Not really just because of what he’d said to me about God, but because it was such a weird experience, and nobody remembered him but me and I’m telling you, he was a real guy at my real workplace who rode to Iowa in my real car, and we had a real conversation and then he was just gone.

This really happened to me.

And it really happened just as I’ve told it.

And it really stuck, because of the way it happened.

This event in my life paved the way for me for what God was going to do in the future, which was to reveal Himself to me (Christ revealed to us, as Paul wrote in the New Testament). It was part of the rock-solid foundation the Lord was building in my life.

The verses I read today from Matthew got me thinking about this and got me thinking about all the ways God is working in the lives of people all the time. Remarkable things like this happened often. Have they happened to you? Maybe they’re happening to people you’re praying for. Don’t stop praying! Please!

And maybe you can share something God did to get ahold of you, to get your attention, to make a mark on your life, that was how He was drawing you to Himself, so He could save you for time and all eternity, give you new life, freedom, hope, joy, peace, and forgiveness.

I personally believe that I had an encounter with some kind of angel in disguise. He told me the truth, and it stuck. And he disappeared from sight in an instant, and that stuck. I don’t know that I was entertaining an angel unawares, but I do believe it was an angel, nonetheless. God sent him to my workplace, God made me comfortable enough with him to give him a ride from Nebraska to Iowa, and God set up those circumstances with nobody else remembering this man and him poof vanishing right out of thin air so that I would not forget that moment in my life.

And when the next moment came along for me, when God was doing the miraculous to get hold of me, you’d better believe that this moment was still fresh on my mind.

I’ll share Part Two of my salvation story in the next episode, and I hope you’ll tune in because it’s really a precious part of my life, and I’m honored to be alive to share it with you. And I mean that. Share your story with somebody as the Lord leads, and of course feel free to share this episode if it might encourage others that are in your say social media circle.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll see ya back here next time. Bye bye.