Awards resonate with us because they represent a moment when we can give and receive love. If we’re the award recipient, we are the receiver of that love. If we are the award giver or the onlooker, we can bestow love onto the winner. Awards are a time for kisses, hugs, back-slaps, high-fives, and times to say “You’re the best” and “You’re a winner.” They are a time to say, “Let’s meet up so I can further congratulate you and bask in your glory.” They are a time to say, “Let’s work together on a future project.”

People love award winners because they have achieved greatness. This love, therefore, is conditional on one thing: success. It’s a love with strings attached.

Getting What We Don’t Deserve… This Amazing Grace

For all its razzle and dazzle, Hollywood and the whole world-success community don’t do one thing well at all. They don’t award failure. They don’t award non-achievement.

Imagine if your name or my name were called this year at the Kodak Theater on February 24^th for best actor or best director. It would be a joke. All the nominees would sit in their chairs with their mouths agape and we’d be sitting in our living rooms (or at a party) and say, “Whoa! I didn’t even know I was in the running.” The presenter would smile a moment, lean over and say into the microphone, “Matthew Kinne couldn’t be here tonight to accept the award. We will accept in on his behalf.” The band would play, someone might applaud awkwardly, and then a few days later, the Oscar would show up on your door step in a box filled with Styrofoam peanuts.

This scenario is absurd. It’s like out of some Salvadore Dali painting or Michel Gondry movie. It’s a dream.

But this is the award that God offers to everybody. Greater than the Nobel Prize, or a Kennedy Honor or even an Academy Award, God offers to all the prize of eternal life filled with peace, joy, and fulfilled relationship. This prize is available to everybody, and the greatest thing of all is that there isn’t a single thing we can do to earn it. We don’t have to act, direct, cure cancer, or bring peace to the Middle East. In fact, the prize is awarded to all who admit they are failures, to those who haven’t put in the best performance, to those who really stink at being any good at all.

God offers love to all, with no strings attached. It’s available to all who admit they need God and are terrible at living life without Him.

In God, we receive:

• Words of affirmation: Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. –Luke 12:7
• Quality time: And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. –Matthew 28:20
• Gifts: The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. –Romans 6:22
• Acts of service: My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. –Psalm 121:2
• And physical touch: But Jesus answered, "No more of this!" And he touched the man's ear and healed him –Luke 22:51.

Paper certificates burn. Metal trophies rust and corrode. But the love of God, his award for our relationship with him, endures beyond the Kodak Theater and the grave. His love endures forever.

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