Give to your neighbours

Deuteronomy 15:11 There are always going to be poor and needy people among you. So I command you: Always be generous, open purse and hands, give to your neighbours in trouble, your poor and hurting neighbours.

Deuteronomy 15:11

For the poor shall never cease out of the land,.... There would be always such objects to exercise their charity and beneficence towards, Joh 12:8, which is no contradiction to Deu 15:4 for had they been obedient to the laws of God, they would have been so blessed that there would have been none; so the Targums; but he foresaw that they would not keep his commands, and so this would be the case, and which he foretells that they might expect it, and do their duty to them, as here directed:

therefore I command thee, saying, thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother; not give sparingly, but largely, in proportion to the necessities of the poor, and according to the abilities of the lender or giver; and this must be done to a brother, one that is near in the bonds of consanguinity, and to him a man must give or lend first, as Aben Ezra observes, and then "to thy poor"; the poor of thy family, as the same writer:

and to thy needy in the land; that are in very distressed circumstances, though not related, and particularly such as are in the same place where a man dwells; for, as the same writer remarks, the poor of thy land are to be preferred to the poor of another place.

Deu 15:7-8, Deu 15:11

I. "God has made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell upon the face of the whole earth." This is the announcement of a grand fact, which has never yet been successfully disproved. This relates man to man everywhere, makes all the world a neighbourhood, and founds upon universal affinity a universal claim. This general law, however, must be divided into minor modifications, or it will be practically useless. Hence all private affections are recognised and hallowed, and are indeed the sources from which all public virtues spring. We are bound to love our neighbour as ourselves, and if in a contracted Hebrew spirit you are inclined to press the inquiry, "And who is my neighbour?" there comes a full pressure of utterance to authenticate and enforce the answer, Man.

II. The last clause of the text is as true to-day as in the time of its original utterance. The poor shall never cease out of the land; in every age and in every clime there are distinctions of society in the world. Society could not cohere as a union of equals; there must be graduation and dependence. In the text benevolence to the poor is positively enjoined, and enjoined because of their abiding existence as a class of the community. Once recognise the relationship, and the claim will inevitably follow; the sense of service rendered and obligation created thereby will make that claim more sacred; and Religion, attaching her holiest sanction, lifts the recognition of the claim into a duty which may not be violated without sin.

III. "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye did it unto Me." This is our Divinely furnished argument. "She hath done what she could." This is to be the measure of our giving.