Deuteronomy 15:10

Your charity must be free. "You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging" (Deut. 15:10). That is, you shall not be troubled at parting with your money. Whoever gives with grief gives grudgingly. Charity must flow like spring water. The heart must be the spring, the hand the pipe, the poor the cistern. God loves a cheerful giver.

Here the deep springs of the poor selfish heart are exposed and judged. Nothing reveals the hidden roots of evil in human nature like grace. Man must be renewed in the very deepest springs of his moral being before he can carry divine love to others. And even those whom grace has renewed must keep constant watch against the hideous forms of selfishness that our fallen nature dresses itself in. Nothing but grace can keep the heart open wide to every form of human need.

An open heart and a wide hand are like God. "God loves a cheerful giver," because that is precisely what He is Himself. "He gives generously to all, and does not reproach." And He would grant to us the rare and most exquisite privilege of being imitators of Him. … We are not only saved by grace. We stand in grace, live under the blessed reign of grace, and breathe the very atmosphere of grace. And we are called to be living expressions of grace, not only to fellow believers but to the whole human family.

Chapter 15 teaches everyone among the people to treat their poor brothers with generosity and grace. That care was also made certain for them by the year of release, which applied to debts and to Hebrew slaves. The man who honoured Jehovah in His poor was to depend on God. God would bless him for acting in this way, as He had commanded, for the poor were His poor.

The man who sows seed by scattering what he has to give deals with a God "who is able to make all grace abound." ALL grace, note — grace of every kind. Grace in spiritual things and grace in material things. … God enriches him so that his giving can keep going and grow. This enrichment may not come in material things. God may choose instead to enrich him in spiritual things, so that the man who began by giving a little money ends by handing out a rich store of spiritual blessing.

Almost the whole of Deuteronomy 15 lays down laws about how the people were to treat their poor. … If there were no poor, the rule would lapse. But verse 11 tells them plainly that "the poor will never cease out of the land." For us Christians the same is true. There will always be some among us who are "weak in the faith," who are only "babes" in Christ. Those strong in the faith must take care. Otherwise their "knowledge" may make "the weak brother perish, for whom Christ died" (1 Cor. 8:11). We must consider the poor and the weak.