The Purpose of "Rules"

We must consecrate ourselves.
That's a term we often misunderstand, but it's one that is crucial in this modern world.
The definition is, according to Merriam-Webster, "dedicated to a sacred purpose."
With television, internet, video games, movies, commercials, sports, and all sorts of hollow pleasures being shoved in our faces, we forget what consecration is. We think we've consecrated ourselves if we don't cuss, don't smoke, don't drink, and we get to church on Sunday. I want to address true consecration, and it will seem extremist in current relation.
There is no bend like on a graph where it follows the social norm. It is a straight line. In fact, it is that very line that the social norm bends away from or towards. It is the standard by which all else is measured.

In Exodus 19, Moses was told to consecrate people and a mountain (Sinai, to be specific). It was so that people were not to eve touch the mountain lest they be executed. This is consecration, and there wasn't even a television set for him to tell people to turn off. This is setting aside something (ourselves) as being so given over to God's purpose that if any worldly thing touches it, we are to sever it.
This doesn't mean to kill people, this means to kill relationships that are drawing us away from God, to rid ourselves of distractions, to cease anything and everything that does not draw us and others into a closer relationship with our Creator. When we give up our earthly identity to find identity in Christ, when we stop seeking anything of this world as a goal and set instead Christ as our sole focus, we have consecrated ourselves. We have dedicated ourselves to a sacred purpose, and this purpose is being like Christ.
In this place of consecration, sanctification is offered to us.

"to make (something) holy."
"to give official acceptance or approval to (something)."

Those are two of the definitions of sanctification. These are the fulfillment of consecration. When we set something apart for sacred use (as we should our everyday lives), we are setting it apart to be holy. This is impossible for man, yet what is impossible for man is possible with God. God brings it to fruition by meeting us in our flawed but striving state, and He puts something wholly righteous within us; His Spirit.
We will never achieve righteousness, holiness, or even something as general as "good" on our own. No one is good except for God. And, for the sake of contrast, i want to point out that what's not good is bad. God created the Heavens and the earth, He made man, and all the things He made, He saw that it was good. Because it resonated with His image and His Word and His Spirit. But when we disobeyed, even the ground was cursed, and there was nothing good on earth any longer. Without His Spirit, we are, simply put, miserable and pitiable beings.
When God meets us and finalizes our act of consecration by sanctifying us, we are still just as flawed of people, we simply have something good living within us.

Here's my point in all of this; we hate rules, we hate boundaries, and we hate restrictions. We hate them because they get in our way of doing what we want. However, when we love God, we don't see these things as hindrances because our goal is to be like Him, and our actions and attitude must change if we are to be more like Him. Rules are very profitable, but not of themselves. I've gone so far as to ask God to increase my convictions so that i may give more of my self to Him, and i would encourage others to consider the same.
If your goal when you wake up in the morning is to not smoke, cuss, drink, have sex, or just sin in general, you're missing it. If your goal when you wake up is to please God, then all these evasions of sin will come as natural as that first yawn. There will be struggles, there will be failures, but trying to please God is the only way out.

To go one step further, living in God's righteousness is a trial, of sorts.
If someone asks to borrow your car and they have a dozen speeding tickets to their name and have had multiple wrecks, are you going to let them borrow it? Probably not. If they have never been stopped nor have they committed any serious traffic violation, you'd be more likely to lend them your keys.
If we are flippant with the life God has given us (in other words, if we are reckless in our convictions, giving way to sin every time a demon rears its head or if we continually feed the 'self'), then God is probably not going to give us the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, nor will He give us the greater gifts of the Spirit. The grace is there, but He wants radicals willing to give up anything or to do anything for Him.

If we don't prove ourselves trustworthy to safeguard and to multiply one gift, or to even nourish it, why would He give us two or five talents when we so miserably failed with the one?
He wants us to try for righteousness. If we don't make the attempt to live as holy beings, He will not entrust us with holy things.

Concerning Consecration

Firstly, i am not going to say that Sunday is a less important day of the week. It's the day we honor the Sabbath, though orthodoxically the Sabbath falls on a Saturday, not a Sunday. Then again, Easter and Christmas don't fall on the days of Christ's birth or resurrection; those are merely when we observe them.
I understand the importance of observation, and that Sundays, being the day we honor the Sabbath, are important.
So without further ado, carrying on.

I want to bring to mind a certain fellow from the New Testament, perhaps the last of the Old Testament prophets. To know what i mean by "Old Testament prophets," those that lived before Christ were often the sort that lived as recluses, living outside of society, in hills, wildernesses, and the like. They were revered, probably even feared by some for their seeming mystical lifestyle and nature. They didn't dress nice, they didn't eat the same things as everybody else; they lived by the provision of God, and relied only on it. They could've taken to fame and grew in wealth, but they did just the opposite. Above all else, they knew who they were in God. They spoke with no authority of their own, but rather said "This is what the Lord says," invoking nothing of their own but rather the words God had given them.
And John the Baptist was of this lot.
He knew who he was, what God called him to, and set himself on (or rather, was called to) the same path as these prophets; "A voice of one calling in the wilderness, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for Him.'".
He was a prophet who had been prophesied about.

We are not called to simply live good on Sundays. I'm not talking about smoking, cussing, drinking; i'm talking about living as though God was alive in your heart!
We are a bipolar Church. We raise our hands on Sunday morning, we go up front for prayer, we may even shed tears, enough to fill a well, but come Monday many seem to have forgotten it.
Consecration is not merely living good. It's living in faith. It's trusting in God's providence. It's having faith that, though we may be homeless, orphans, abused, alone, starving, that God has providence to get His will completed, be it in our rags, or in our riches. It is the casting off of everything society expects of us. It is living without shame, not being afraid to be seen as a strange mystic to someone who doesn't understand the power flowing through us from Christ. It is being renewed according to Romans 12:1-2, offering ourselves as a living sacrifice should our Father in Heaven decide we should be required to die for His name. It is losing all inhibition, abiding by every faintest conviction of behavior we may receive from the Holy Spirit. It's being radically compliant to the Word of God, seeing God's place for us in Scripture and stripping ourselves away until we are fashioned into His decrees, set down by His prophets.

Yes, one of the Ten Commandments is to remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. In context, it is a law regarding work, not behavior. We are not told to live holier on this day, nor are we told to be a bolder follower of Christ on this day. No, instead we are told that the Sabbath is our day of rest.
I would dare say it more important to live in a consecrated manner for six days and then be laxed on the one--but that would be a falsity. The only truly Christian way to live is seven days a week. To live as though we were inside of the church every single moment, because we are the Church. The Church meets at a building on Sundays. We call it the House of the Lord, but that term was for the Temple of God set up by David if i'm not mistaken. The House of the Lord is, since the tearing of the veil, the Temple of God, is within us. It inhabits the church building only when we, the Church, occupies it, and only by proxy then.
Our sin is not in treating the building as less than absolutely holy. It is in treating our daily life as somehow less sanctified.
You carry the Church with you on Sundays when you are at the meeting place we call church, and also Monday through Saturday as you work, shop, eat, play games, sleep, read, breathe; in all things, you are the living and breathing Church, the tangible Body of Christ to the world.
It is your consecration to behave that way.
Our commission is to make disciples of all the nations--but this commission begins within us. We are the nations, too. Make disciples of yourselves first.
We are each called to be the next John The Baptist, the one who cries out to all who pass by, "Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for Him."