Hi everyone. I am asking anyone that feels led to pray for my brother again.
Some months ago, unbeknownst to me, my brother met a professing christian by chance on the street. This man took him to a church in my town I have been to before. It was the pastor, I believe, who led him in a "sinner's prayer". My brother is very familiar with the Bible and "christianese" so it is easy for him to use christian phrases, and when I talked to him, I knew for sure he did not have a real encounter with God or saving faith. One of the reasons I can be sure of this is my brother said God "didn't care" about his addiction to methadone and would basically give him a mulligan. Also he kept using foul language and "rebuked me in Jesus' name" for not accepting his conversion as genuine. This is exactly the kind of thing I have been worried about and why I am so against easy believeism. (This is not the only time I have seen false converts come out of this church in exactly the same way.) I have told him time and again, in love, that Jesus requires full surrender, he must repent and place his faith in Christ alone for salvation, not to trust in the fact that he said a prayer or anything like that. In the past I have prayed for him, read the Bible to him, and seen genuine conviction for sin; I have felt the Holy Spirit manifest in the room to the point where he was in tears.
Please, if you can, pray that God keeps him away from these kinds of destructive ministries and that God would keep convicting him of sin. This might sound severe, but I would rather him hang around drug addicts and criminals than false converts.
It is the grief of my heart to see so many professing christians unsaved and making false converts. I don't hate that church or the pastor; I love and pray that God would open their eyes.