Living without Christ is like driving a car with its front end out of line. You can stay on the road if you grip the steering wheel with both hands and hang on tightly. Any lapse of attention, however, and you head straight for the ditch. Society, its general educators, political leaders, and parents, exhorts us to drive straight and curb our destructive tendencies. But it is a ceaseless struggle.

Coming to Christ is a little like getting a front-end alignment. The pull toward the ditch is corrected from the inside. That is not to say that there won't be bumps and potholes ahead that will still try to jar us off the road. Temptations and challenges will always test our alertness to steer a straight course. And we can hardly afford to fall asleep at the wheel. But the basic skew in the moral mechanism has been repaired.