My wife and I like to try different diets for our health. I need to lose weight. She has Hashimoto’s and experiments to see how food affects her energy levels.
Mediterranean. Paleo. Keto. Juicing. Dukan. Vegetarian. We’ve tried them all.
Then I came across the Zero Carb Diet.
It’s exceedingly simple.
On the Zero Carb Diet, you only eat meat and water.
That’s it.
Meat.
Water.
Nothing else.
Simple right?
So I joined a Facebook group to learn more about it. I was especially interested to hear from people who were on the diet for an extended period of time. How did it impact their health? Instead, I met a bunch of curiosity seekers and learned something about the gospel.
New people would join the group every day, and they would always ask the same kind of question.
“On this diet, can you also eat avocadoes?”
“No, it’s only meat and water.”
“Can you eat salad?”
“You can on a different diet, but on this one, it’s just meat and water.”
“What about gummy vitamins?”
“No, you get all your vitamins from the meat.”
“What about drinking coffee?”
“No.”
“Can you use BBQ sauce?”
“No! Just MEAT and WATER.”
“What about bananas?”
And on and on it went.
People just didn’t get it.
Why not?
The diet was so simple. You eat meat. Any kind of meat. And all parts of it. The fat, the organs, and the muscle. And you drink water. Not tea. Not coffee. Not beer. Just water.
But they missed it. Over and over and over again.
Isn’t the gospel like that?
I tell people that belief is the only condition to have eternal life—no works required.
And then come the questions.
“But you need to be baptized too, right?”
“No, just believe. No works.”
“What about helping the poor?”
“Nope.”
“Yeah, but you can’t commit adultery, right?”
“You shouldn’t. But that’s not a condition to be born again. Faith is the only condition.”
“Well, what about…”
And on and on it goes.
Just like the simplicity of the meat and water diet, people just can’t seem to wrap their minds around the simplicity of the saving message.
But there’s an upside. On that Zero Carb Diet group, people would eventually understand. You might have to go through a whole list of forbidden foods, and emphasize over and over that meat and water were the only things to eat, but eventually, after lots of back and forth, they would eventually understand that it all came down to meat and water.
Now, at that point, once they understood what the diet entailed, many people would reject it. That happens. And that will happen when you evangelize too. But keep at it.
Whether it’s a diet, or evangelism, persistence pays off.
