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"What It's Like To Die"Sitting with a group of friends one night, the question came up, “What’s it like to die?” The guy who asked the question admitted it was heavy on his mind because, as he put it, “I’m afraid to die.” I happily took him to this passage in the Gospel of John…After saying these things, Jesus said to his disciples, "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him." The disciples said to him, "Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover." Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, "Lazarus has died.”When the friends of Jesus die, they fall asleep. That’s how Luke put it when he wrote about the death of Stephen in Acts 7… “And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep."The idea of death as sleep implies two things: First, falling asleep oozes gentleness. Sleep is gentle, quiet, and comfortable. No one ever falls asleep violently or bitterly. People drift off to sleep. Gently. You might have a squirming, crying child in your arms…but as you rock them, sing to them, and cradle them, eventually they calm down, relax, their eyes droop, and they drift gently off into sleep.If you are terrified at the thought of dying, you need Jesus to be your friend. Because if you’re the friend of Jesus, your death, whenever it comes—next week, next year, twenty years from now, will not really be death—it will be a falling asleep. Second, falling asleep presupposes waking up. Dead people don’t wake up. On the other hand, the friends of Jesus don’t die. They fall asleep, and then they wake up. My friend, who was a very dear friend of Jesus, fell asleep here and woke up somewhere else, which is wonderfully encouraging to all of us left behind. It means she is not forever ripped from our lives.Since sleeping means waking up, it is not a thing to be terrified of, any more than you should be afraid of falling asleep. And that, my friends, is what death is like for the friends of Jesus—they fall asleep.