I confess I’ve had to try really hard to stay away from Twitter. It sounds fun, but I need another thing to distract me on the computer like I need a slap in the face. So at this point I’m staying away.
Curt has a Twitter account that he uses to follow a handful of well-known pastors, speakers, and authors. One night when I was staying up too late just so I could enjoy my time off from mom duty, I snuggled up next to him and read the page over his shoulder. No one really likes that, so eventually he just handed me the computer. I went back and read a few days’ worth of tweets from these men.
Each one’s voice – their unique perspective and tone – came out loud and clear through their Twitter updates. Each one spoke of and pointed to Christ, but they could not have been more different. They lined up on the page in such a way that they could be easily compared. None was like the other, but it seemed to me that their voices together made a whole. Curtis has always read and listened to a wide range of teachers. If he only listened to one of those teachers all the time, he would risk becoming lopsided.
First Corinthians 12 tells us that the body of Christ is made up of different parts. We have very different functions and giftings, but we work together to bring glory to God. We need each other in order to be whole.
Seeing Curt’s Twitter page was a great reminder that I shouldn’t just get comfortable in one classroom and refuse to learn from any other teacher. I think it’s normal to find a teacher that we really identify with and who particularly gets us excited about the Word. But we will miss a blessing – and perhaps and arm and a leg – if we don’t let ourselves hear the other doctrinally sound Christian voices, all with remarkably different pitches, out there.
The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.
Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body. (1 Corinthians 12:12-20)
