If Christ calls death only sleep, we have no need to fear the grave—but the deeper danger is the sleep of sin, where the soul slumbers unaware, deaf to the call to rise. —D.

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The Lord of life calls death sleep. And that alone is enough to still the fear in a man’s chest. No darkness, no final end—only a lying down, a rest from labor, a waiting for the call that will surely come. The grave is no prison but a chamber, no iron-bound fate but a night before the morning. And if Christ calls the dead only sleeping, then what need have we to tremble before the long hush of the tomb?

But there is a sleep deeper than death, a weight heavier than the grave. Sin settles on a man like thick sodden air, pulling him down, blinding him, pressing him into a stupor from which he does not easily rise. The sleeper in sin does not hear the cock’s crow at dawn. He does not stir at the ringing bell, does not feel the light widening at the edges of his darkened room. He dreams his own dreams and thinks them real, while the world of the living moves on without him.

To die is not to be lost—at the call of Christ, the dust will stir, the bones will rise, the breath will return to the waiting chest. But to sleep in sin, to be dulled to the voice of God, is the greater death, the harder burial. The man sunk in his sin does not wait for waking; he does not know he is asleep at all. The dead will rise at the Lord’s bidding, but the sinner must first hear, must first turn, must first be shaken from the slumber that holds him bound.

Wake up, Sleeper! So your soul laid heavy with its own undoing would rise, would stretch, would step out into the morning light. The grave is nothing to fear; it is only a resting place before the trumpet sounds. But the sleep of sin—that is the deeper danger, the unmarked grave of the living. The Word calls out. The Light is breaking in. The slumbering must be stirred, before the night deepens, before the last door closes, before they wake to find that the time for waking is gone.