Jesus, You're a Dirty Rotten Sinner

There's a whole segment of the church that preaches a gospel message that sounds something like this: You're a dirty rotten sinner and you always will be. But Jesus, if you pray this magic prayer, then he won't send you to hell when you die. That doesn't sound like good news to me. I don't want to go through my entire life thinking that God is mad at me about every wrong thing that I do. And so we create systems and we preach messages that are really more about manipulation than they are about actual life change.