I was in the U. S. Navy in Pensacola, Florida, and working on a master’s degree in marine microbiology at West Florida University. The final exam in a biochemistry class asked us to “eat” a bit of food and draw every chemical reaction through the body until the waste was excreted from the body.
The energy from all those reactions is stored as ATP and the by-products are water and CO2. The water is reused by the body or urinated out; the CO2 is exhaled. In “country-boy” language, this is how you lose weight, by converting sugars and fats into energy.
Your muscles are made from two strands of protein. Myosin has little hooks to hold and pull the actin to create a muscle contraction using ATP for energy. The myosin shears off one of the ATP phosphates creating ADP, releasing a small amount of heat or calories. The ADP is now available to take on another phosphate to become ATP and the cycle starts all over again. Jesus sums up all that scientific jargon in one line …
“Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord. Jesus came, took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. This was now the third time Jesus appeared to his disciples after he was raised from the dead. (John 21:12-17)
Jesus is the God who created the “citric acid cycle” and yet there is not one word about it in this passage. He simply says, “Come and have breakfast.” Sometimes we preachers like to use big words; after all, we paid lots of money for a seminary education where we learned all those big words. It’d be a shame not to use some of them … so we do.
One of my professors told us, “The gospel of Jesus Christ is so deep, nobody will ever fully comprehend it; but it’s so simple, even a child can understand it.”

Charles Whatley is a retired United Methodist pastor,  and, with Mary Ella, a missionary to the Navajo Reservation.