I have absolutely zero problem with people who have high standards. If you have made rules for yourself, your family or your ministry about:

• How to dress
• What music to listen to
• What books to read
• What movies (or lack of movies) to watch
• How often to attend church
• etc.

Good for you. Especially if those rules come out of your understanding and application of scripture. I have my own rules born of scripture for myself, my family, and my ministry as well. In fact, I think more Christians should be making these types of rules for themselves and applying scripture in their own life.

If your standards are "higher" than mine. Cool. No problem. I will attend camps, schools, or meetings with people who have "higher" standards than I do and will gladly submit to their rules. It is not my job or my mission to change you. I'm happy you are living out scripture.

There is one scenario involving standards, however, where I will not be silent, and unfortunately, I have seen this several times. If you are going to have high standards, you better start with high standards about how the gospel is preached and how the Word of God is handled.

Unfortunately, there are groups of Christians who make much of having "high standards" but seem to have no standards at all about the most important things. These are the people who will get bent out of shape about hemlines but see no issue with manipulative and reductionistic presentations of the gospel. They will shout and scream about the King James but then sit for weeks under preaching where its plain meaning is ignored or twisted. They seem to spend more time thinking about what groups of people wear swimming than they do the things the scripture actually emphasizes.

This crowd deserves no quarter. If they cannot be shown the error of their ways, then they are to be marked and avoided. They are actually preaching another gospel and need to be treated as we would any other cult.

Short Cuts

This is how I imagine this happened: Good meaning people looked at the end result of sanctification, Bible preaching, good doctrine, and preaching the gospel and started describing it. They started seeing that, when the gospel is preached, believing people pray and talk to Jesus. When people are following the Lord, they start to dress differently and act differently. In their mind, if that was the result of this whole thing, why not make it the stated goal and if we know what our destination is, why not take a shortcut?

If the destination of sharing the gospel is people praying to God, why not emphasize the prayer? Why not do everything in our power to get people to say a prayer? If you can get people to say a prayer, why bother with explaining our guilt before God and Jesus satisfaction of that guilt? In their mind, explaining the gospel can even get in the way of the gospel, after all "They said the prayer didn't they?"

If the destination is having a bunch of clean living, church attending, dress wearing Christians - why not just preach on that all the time? Why bother actually teaching what the Bible says and explaining what the Bible emphasizes, if there are shorter paths to the destination? If these are the things we are after, let's talk about them all the time, let's make them the point of invitation in every sermon we preach to Christians (or to those who have already "said the prayer".)

But what about the Bible?

If we accept this premise, we don't really need the Bible, just parts of it.

• We don't need the book of Romans (who understands it anyways?) just "the Roman's Road."
• The first three chapters of Ephesians, nah, we'll get as quickly as possible to the last two chapters - that's where the good stuff is anyway.
• The Pentateuch? Genesis 1 is good for picking on evolution. There are some good stories in there we can use to preach whatever. It has the ten commandments and there is that one verse in Deuteronomy about male and female clothing.
• Hebrews? We like the part about "not forsaking the assembly" and "obeying them that have the rule over you." Those first 9 chapter though??

Thomas Jefferson infamously went through his Bible with a pen knife, cutting out the parts he didn't like. But if we accept this approach, we might as well go through our Bible with a pen knife and just cut out the parts that get us to where we want to go and make a new book.

Of course, when we do this, what we are really saying is that we know better than God. We are saying that "all scripture is given by inspiration of God", but only some of it is "profitable...that the man of God may be perfect." If we do this, what we have really done is created our own replacement religion.

If we do this, we have taken God's wonderful bounty, the diverse and nutritious diet He's prepared for His children, and replaced it with chicken nuggets and microwaved TV dinners. It may be quicker, but are we sure it's even food? What are the long term effects? Could it be that our churches are full of spiritually bloated and sickly people because we didn't have the time to cook them scriptural meals and instead kept pulling boxes out of the freezer to microwave?

Fixing this

If none of this makes any sense to you, and if you have never seen this, then praise the Lord. You can move right along. This wasn't aimed at you. But if you read this and thought "ouch." Then here is the way out:

Study the scriptures

You will not find what you need in some book or some blog post, but in the Bible. Stop just reading it and start digging in. Put that Bible aside that has all the notes and highlights in it and get a new one and just determine that you are going to understand every word and every character. Learn the basic principles of interpretation, dig deep, understand how each sentence works with the sentence before and the sentence after. Take no shortcuts.

Trust the scriptures

God knew what He was doing when He gave us the Bible. There is not a word of it that is superfluous, not a word that is unnecessary. Don't skip over the doctrinal parts to get to the "practical" parts. Give people the Bible. Give them all of what God intended for them. When you run out of things to say, read the next verse.

Emphasize what the scriptures emphasize

The emphasis of scripture is not "say a prayer, get saved and then live right." The emphasis of the scripture is Christ. Everything up until the cross is leading to the cross. Everything after the cross is explaining it and applying how it works in our life. The only hero in the story is Jesus. The majority of the "work" is done by Christ. Once you understand these things, two things happen: 1. The Bible starts to make a whole lot more sense. 2. It changes our application.

Refuse to be reductionistic about salvation and sanctification

The gospel is simple. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." When we look to the Serpent on the pole, we live. The Bible is rich with various ways the gospel is presented and people trusted in Christ.

But there is no substitute and no shortcut for actually seeing yourself a sinner and trusting in the work of Christ. It is the faith that saves people, not a walk down the aisle or repeating specific words, and not a trip through a baptismal tank. If we make the gospel mechanical, we are no different than the catholics or the cambellites.

Just as there is no substitutes and shortcuts for salvation, there are no substitutes and shortcuts to sanctification. You cannot begin in the Spirit and "be made perfect in the flesh." (Galatians 3:3). We need all of scripture to make us "perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works" (2 Timothy 3:17) If we reduce it to those parts that are most actionable, we are no better than the Pharisees or Judiazers.

Conclusion

I'm all for having high standards, but let's make sure we start with high standards about the gospel and the way we handle scripture and work out from there. If you don't, what you actually have is your own traditions imposed on the Bible. That puts you on dangerous ground.