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This is part one of a two-part series.

The Bill of Rights, the three branches of government, habeas corpus—we studied all that as my eighth-grade son covered civics a few months ago. I thought it was fascinating—the subtleties of courts and jurisdictions, landmark rulings, the way government powers evolved and were tested. Who wouldn't love that stuff? Well, my son for one.

Doctrine often comes off as the spiritual equivalent of civics. We teach them both to our kids on the edge of adulthood because even though they may not be interested, we know they're going to need this stuff if they're going to be responsible citizens and Christians.

But Christian doctrine is far more than spiritual civics, and preachers are entrusted with the privilege of making sure the tenets of our faith don't start looking like the gray-white obelisk of the Washington Monument. There are three insider secrets that bring doctrinal preaching to life.

Wonderland

I've read somewhere that when Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, he set out to create a world that defied the laws of logic. The world defined by Christian doctrine doesn't defy logic, but God has certainly brought a kind of mind-altering super-logic to it. Paul sounds a bit like Alice when he asks, "Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? … For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom … " (1 Cor. 1:20, 25).

It is the job of the preacher to highlight this utterly counter intuitive "foolishness of God." To do that well, we have to help our people see that the world they think of as normal—the way of thinking that is natural to us—is actually as goofy as Alice's Wonderland. In fact, the really hard job isn't explaining Christian doctrine. It is convincing people that the world as we have been raised to see it is actually cockeyed. It is full of silliness and contradictions. We're all as crazy as Mad Hatters.

Before we can open a text's doctrinal meaning, we probably have to set people up for the whammy of godly logic. We walk them unsuspectingly into something they assume to be true. Like this: "If you came home from work and asked your kids, 'Were you good today?' that can only mean one thing: 'Did you keep the rules?' Isn't that what being good means? Do you see any wiggle room in that definition? Being good means keeping the rules."

You can play out the line a little more if you want, but you've got 'em where you want 'em. Then you lob in the doctrine: "Actually, there is a way you can be good without keeping the rules. In fact, you can get credit for being very, very good even if you have broken about every rule there is. And it is all perfectly legal. In fact, God is in on it. Actually, this could only happen if God made it happen. Listen to Romans 3: 'But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known … and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus'" (vv. 21–24).

Every doctrine in Scripture—major and minor—is counterintuitive. Gospel doctrine in all its aspects is inevitably a teeth-rattling paradigm shift. For example, we can't quite believe that sin is all that bad. The Incarnation, the power of God in the Cross, the filling of the Holy Spirit, the new heavens and new earth—all of it, a Wonderland of holy, counterintuitive, God-wise logic.

The application of such sermons is not so much what we do as how we think. We keep hearing that practical sermons tell us what to do, when every Christian preacher should know that the Bible spends a great deal more time and energy "renewing our minds." By teaching doctrine, we give people the inestimable privilege of thinking God's thoughts. When we do that, we will find ourselves acting more like Christ.

In part 2 of this article, the author describes God's Gordian knot.

Lee Eclov recently retired after 40 years of local pastoral ministry and now focuses on ministry among pastors. He writes a weekly devotional for preachers on Preaching Today.