Dr. John Garlock was a regular guest speaker—and a consistent favorite—at our church. A professor of homiletics at Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas, Texas, for many years, he had a masterful gift of preaching.
In several of his messages, he would recall incidents from his childhood in Africa, where his parents were missionaries. It was a primitive part of the world at that time, and Dr. John had indelible memories of a people and a culture that had to employ ingenuity to survive against long odds and harsh conditions.
If certain crops failed, it became difficult for the people to even find enough to eat, and they would live on the raw edge of starvation. Because wildlife in that region had been overhunted, the villagers had to look for meat wherever they could find it—and that meant trapping monkeys, which they had in abundance.
Eating monkeys might sound unpleasant to our delicate palates, but when you find yourself close to starvation, you don’t have much choice. In that place and time, you couldn’t visit a grocery store or call out for pizza.
Bagging a monkey, however, is no easy task, no matterhow hungry you might be. Swift, agile, and clever, these animals couldn’t be hunted in conventional ways with primitive weapons.
But then someone came up with a sure-fire plan—using the monkey’s own nature to capture it. The villagers had access to some heavy glass jars, which they would tie to posts driven into the ground. The narrow mouth of the jar was the key to the contraption. The hunters would place a banana into the jar—every monkey’s supreme delight. After observing the banana for a time from the shelter of the jungle, the monkey would sneak up to the post, thrust its paw into the jar, and get a grip on the banana.
But then—holding the banana—it couldn’t remove its paw through the narrow mouth of the jar. In order to escape, all the monkey had to do was let go of the banana. But it wouldn’t do that! Even with the hunter approaching with a club, the animal didn’t have the reasoning ability to simply drop the fruit and run to safety. Instinctively, it wanted to run. But it didn’t have the necessary will power to master its desire for the banana and escape with its life. As a result, the hunter dispatched the monkey with his club and took it home for the family dinner.
What do we learn from this experience? Dr. Garlock used to put it like this: In the spiritual world, where warfare rages between hell and the kingdom of God, temptation remains the adversary’s greatest weapon. He disguises his deadly traps and snares with enticements and allurements that we may at times find difficult to resist. Even though we may know we are placing ourselves in spiritual peril, we sometimes have difficulty letting go of the very thing that is about to cripple or destroy us.
But here’s the point.
We have to let go.
And with the help of Jesus Christ, we can let go.
Hebrews 12:1 reminds us that the Christian life is a race, and in order to run the race to win, we have to “lay aside every weight” and “the sin that so easily ensnares us.” The Lord will never ask us to do something that He won’t empower us to accomplish. If He says we can let go, we can let go.
There is something up ahead of us, just around the bend, that is infinitely better and sweeter than a banana.