The newspaper reported that there are 2.6 billion Christmas cards mailed during the Christmas season. Some businesses take in over half of their annual retail business in the month preceding Christmas. Just try to find a parking spot at one of the local malls and you quickly realize how many people depend on Christmas for their livelihoods.

Charitable donations certainly go up around Christmas time. We see people out in front of stores with kettles and bells.

Candy makers, fruit basket providers, mail order catalogs-if there were no Christmas, lots of people would be out of work. The whole country could slide back into recession.

But is the effect of Christmas simply financial?

What if there were no Christmas? Christmas is the holiday which celebrates the birth of Jesus. It is not just about gift giving and trees. It is not just about family gatherings and chestnuts roasting on an open fire.  

If there were no Christmas, how big of a hole would be left in this world? What was the impact of the birth of Christ on the way that this world now functions.

Someone once said that you can tell the size of a boat by the size of the wake it leaves behind. An ocean liner creates a tidal wave in its wake. On the other hand, a small sailboat hardly leaves a ripple.

The same thing is true of a man or a woman. You can tell the impact of a man or a woman by the size of wake they leave behind. Some people, when they are gone, leave a tidal wave in their wake. The world is changed forever because of the impact of that one life. And some people leave almost no evidence that they ever existed.

What if Jesus had never been born? What did Christ leave in the wake of His life?

It is interesting to consider what Jesus didn't leave behind. We have no photos of Christ. We have no contemporary paintings or sculptures. We don't know what Jesus looked like. We have no accurate description of Jesus' face or His physique. We don't know if He was tall or short, fat or thin.

We have no furniture from His carpenter shop-not a table, a chair or even a little box.

We can't visit Jesus' boyhood home the way we can visit Thomas Jefferson's Monticello or the estate of George Washington at Mount Vernon.

We don't have any memoirs written by Jesus. And if we discount the Shroud of Turin, which is said by most scholars to be fraudulent, we don't have a stitch of clothing, a pair of sandals, a hat, a cloak, a tool or a spoon used by Christ.

In some ways, His life was like a sailboat. It left nothing behind. Jesus came into the world, virtually unnoticed. He was born in a frontier village on the eastern edge of the Roman Empire. Apart from His teenage unwed mother and her soon-to-husband, Joseph, the only living creatures to witness the birth of Christ were some cattle. There was no doctor or nurse on the scene, and no report in the local newspaper.

Jesus earned no academic degrees. He won no honors. No Nobel Prize was awarded to Jesus. No Pulitzers, no Heisman Trophies. He never held a political office. His name never appeared on a ballot.

And yet, the wake that was created by the life of Jesus was enough to cover the world with a tidal wave several miles deep. The hole left in the world, if Jesus had never been born, would be the size of a continent.

What if there were no Christmas? People would still be sitting in darkness. How dark was the ancient world before Christ came?

It was a dangerous thing to be born in the ancient world. Child sacrifice was common in Israel, before the Jewish conquest. The Canaanites offered up their children to the gods Baal and Molech. Offering one's children to the gods was not uncommon. Mayans slaughtered their children in Mexico. Sometimes children were thrown into the mouth of a volcano. In Alaska, Eskimos took their babies and put them on ice flows, especially if they were baby girls. In ancient Rome and Greece, female babies would often be left outside to die of exposure. Life outside of the Christian world has been exceedingly cheap.

But then Jesus was born. And because Jesus was born, His followers took on Jesus' view of life. To Jesus every life was precious-the life of the unborn, the life of children, the life of the elderly, the life of the disabled. To Jesus, life was a sacred gift. This view of life as a sacred gift is foundational to the whole way our society is structured, to our criminal law, and to our willingness to intervene in cases of genocide around the world.  

Because of Jesus we have a concern for the weak. The life of Christ was characterized by a passionate care for the least in the society-the sick, the elderly, the widow, the orphan, the leper, the prostitute, and the foreigner. In the wake of Christ's coming, we practice a concern for the weakest in our society.

It is estimated that more than 95 percent of the soup kitchens, the homeless shelters and the activities on behalf of the homeless-the meals brought, the blankets on cold winter nights-is done by Christians. You won't find many atheists running food pantries. You won't find many atheists under the overpasses of our city making sure that the men and women who live by the river or under the bridges stay warm at night. But you will find Christians from Vineyard Columbus and other churches making their way down ravines and climbing under bridges to find men and women who have no one to help them. You won't find many atheist relief agencies, but around the world you will find World Vision and Compassion International and Samaritan's Purse.  

What did Jesus leave behind? Not just human betterment-whether we are talking about the sanctity of life, or concern for the weak, or even the establishment of hospitals-almost all of which originally were founded by Christians. What was left in the wake of the life of Jesus was the revelation of God. If there were no Christmas, if God did not come into the world through the womb of a virgin, then we would not know Him.

We would not know God and we would have no possibility of being changed or being saved. What Jesus left in His wake was the revelation of God. By coming into the world and taking on human flesh, God showed us what He was like.

Do you know what Jesus left in His wake? He left God. Not just social betterment. Not just a better way to live. Jesus left God.

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