Ver. 20. +Now unto Him that is able to do exceedingly abundantly.+--After his prayer proper is ended the full heart of the apostle swells out into a solemn doxology. The frequent and bold compound expressions of St. Paul (_Farrar_ says twenty of the New Testament twenty-eight with ὑπέρ are St. Paul's) spring from the endeavours adequately to express his energetic thought. +According to the pour that worketh in us.+--"The measure of a man" or "of an angel" is insufficient here. Things are not achieved by creaturely mensuration where God works (cf. ch. i. 19-23). Ver. 21. +To Him be the glory.+--"The honour due to His name." +By Christ Jesus.+--He that "climbeth up some other way" with his offering courts his own destruction. +Throughout all ages, world without end.+--R.V. "Unto all generations, for ever and ever." A good specimen of the "exceeding abundantly above all that we . . . understand" as regarded under the aspect of time. It carries our thoughts along the vista of the future, till time melts into eternity. _MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.--Verses_ 1-6. _An Enlarged Gospel_-- +I. Declaring the admission of the Gentiles on the same footing as the Jews to its highest privileges+ (ver. 6).--It came as a surprise to the world of the apostle's day that the Gospel he preached offered its blessings on equal terms to Jew and Gentile. The Jew, accustomed to be the sole repository of Divine revelation, was staggered at the discovery that heaven extended its favours to the outcast, heathenish Gentile; and the Gentile, proudly trusting to his own intellectual activity in the search after truth, greeted with wonder the ampler and loftier revelations of the new evangel. It seemed too good to be true. A new era was dawning, and men were dazzled and bewildered with the splendour of the vision. It is now authoritatively declared that, on the simple conditions of penitence and faith, the Gentile world is incorporated into the body of Christ. So far from being excluded from the Divine favour, the believing Gentiles are reckoned as "fellow-heirs, and of the same body and partakers of the promise in Christ by the gospel"; and the marvel is increased by the discovery that this astounding privilege is no new thought in the Divine mind, but was an essential part of the purpose concerning the race that had been developing in the slow march of the ages. The Hebrew Scriptures with their records of extraordinary theophanies, the saintly characters of Old Testament times, the Messianic revelations and the wealth of spiritual blessing which the isolated Jew had selfishly appropriated to himself, are the heaven-given privileges of universal man.