• Luther: Asleep In Christ

  Contributed by David Dunn on Nov 1, 2025 (message contributor)

    (rate this sermon illustration)

   | 41 views

  Scripture:  1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, John 11:25

  Tags:  Resurrection, Hope

  Denomination: Seventh-Day Adventist

(Martin Luther quotes about death.)

“What is our death but a night’s sleep? For as through sleep all weariness and faintness pass away… so at the Last Day we shall rise again as if we had only slept a night.”

Source: It’s widely reproduced in quotation databases such as AZ Quotes and Luther’s Works, Vol. 28 (WA IV, 484).

2. “He called death ‘a deep, strong, sweet sleep.’”

Source: Gerhard Pfandl, “Martin Luther and Conditional Immortality,” Journal of the Adventist Theological Society 17/1 (2006): 85-100 p. 91 PDF on Andrews University Digital Commons.

--------------

“Wir Christen aber sollen uns im Glauben üben und gewöhnen, den Tod zu verachten und als einen tiefen, starken, süßen Schlaf anzusehen, den Sarg für nichts anderes als unseres Herrn Christi Schoß…”

— Martin Luther, Preface to the Collection of Funeral Hymns (1542)

> English Translation:

“But we Christians should train ourselves in faith and accustom our hearts to despise death, and to regard it as a deep, strong, sweet sleep, and the coffin as nothing else than the bosom of our Lord Christ…”