As Christians, we know that we are new creations in Jesus. So we try to act differently, hoping this will make us more like Him. But changing our outward behavior doesn’t change our hearts. Only by God’s grace can we be transformed internally. Renovation of the Heart lays a biblical foundation for understanding what best-selling author Dallas Willard calls the “transformation of the spirit”—a divine process that “brings every element in our being, working from inside out, into harmony with the will of God.” This fresh approach to spiritual growth explains the biblical reasons why Christians need to undergo change in six aspects of life: thought, feeling, will, body, social context, and soul. Willard also outlines a general pattern of transformation in each area, not as a sterile formula but as a practical process that you can follow without the guilt or perfectionism so many Christians wrestle with. Don’t settle for complacency. Accept the challenge Renovation of the Heart offers to become an intentional apprentice of Jesus Christ, changing daily as you walk with Him.

Roger Williams championed liberty of conscience. Cotton Mather promoted acts of kindness and doing good. Roger Williams was born in London but migrated to Boston and then to Salem, Plymouth, and finally to the town he founded, Providence, Rhode Island. Cotton Mather was born in Boston and never strayed from it. Both were trained Puritan ministers, but the young man Roger resigned from the ministry, saying it was “the best callings but (generally) they are the worst trades in the world.” Instead, he made his living “trucking with the Indians.” Cotton preached at his pulpit at Boston’s Old North Church until seven weeks before he passed away. They both wrote books, especially Cotton, who wrote over four hundred. Alike and yet so different, the two men were thinkers and writers in America’s early religious history. Author William H. Benson compares and contrasts Roger Williams and Cotton Mather in this, the first of six volumes of The Parallel Lives of the Noble American Religious Thinkers vs. Believers. Additional volumes will include: Thomas Paine and George Whitefield, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith, William James and Mary Baker Eddy, Mark Twain and Billy Graham, and H. L. Mencken and Jim Bakker.

Roger Williams is best known as the founder of Rhode Island who was banished from Massachusetts in 1636 for his dangerous thoughts on religious liberty. But the city and colony Williams helped to found was deep in Native country situated between the powerful Narragansett and Wampanoag nations. The Williams that emerges from the documents in this collection is immersed in a dynamic world of Native politics, engaged in regional and trans-Atlantic debates and conversations about religious freedom and the separation of church and state, and situated at the crossroads of colonial outposts and powerful Native nations. Williams lived among and relied on the generosity of his Narragansett neighbors and yet he was a Native enslaver and part of a process that dispossessed regional Indigenous populations. He could establish a colony based on full religious freedom and yet bitterly complain and campaign against residents with whom he disagreed, such as Samuel Gorton or the Quakers. For the first time, Reading Roger Williams offers readers the opportunity to explore the many facets of Williams’s life by including selections from all of his writings, starting with his life in London and ending with one of his final letters, written when he was nearly eighty years old. Each document includes an introduction and annotations to help the reader better understand the text and context.

Excerpt from Experiments of Spiritual Life and Health, and Their Preservatives: In Which the Weakest Child of God May Get Assurance of His Spiritual Life and Blessednesse, and the Strongest May Finde Proportionable Discoveries of His Christian Growth, and the Means of It As the exifience of the following tract was, until quite recently, unknown, * a few words of introduetion, exhibiting its character and the circumf'tances under which it was written, may not be inappropriate. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.