Can God Hear Your Thoughts? Yes, the Bible Says He Knows Them

Yes. The Bible says God knows every thought we have, spoken or not. “Thou understandest my thought afar off,” David prays (Psalm 139:2), and he tells his son Solomon that “the LORD searcheth all hearts, and understandeth all the imaginations of the thoughts” (1 Chronicles 28:9). God hears a prayer we never say aloud as surely as one we shout.

Psalm 139 gives a whole song to this, and it begins with a man who has been searched. “O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me” (Psalm 139:1). God knows when he sits down and when he gets up. He knows the word before it reaches the tongue. David tries to imagine somewhere to hide, in the heights, in the grave, at the far edge of the sea, in the dark, and every place he names, God is already there. Then the psalm ends somewhere we might not expect. The man who could not hide from God asks God to look closer: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts” (Psalm 139:23). Somewhere between the first verse and the last, being known stopped frightening him.

In many places, and in both Testaments. When Samuel looked at Jesse’s son Eliab and thought he must be the one, God corrected him: “for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). Jeremiah, after saying the heart “is deceitful above all things,” hears God answer, “I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins” (Jeremiah 17:9–10). The reins are the kidneys, which Hebrew used for what Strong’s Concordance calls “the mind (as the interior self).”

Solomon, dedicating the temple, prayed that God would forgive his people, “whose heart thou knowest; (for thou, even thou only, knowest the hearts of all the children of men;)” (1 Kings 8:39). The apostles prayed the same way before choosing a replacement for Judas: “Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men” (Acts 1:24). And the Letter to the Hebrews says God’s word is “a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight” (Hebrews 4:12–13).

The verse David spoke to Solomon holds a charge and a promise. Serve God “with a perfect heart and with a willing mind,” David says, “for the LORD searcheth all hearts”; and then, “if thou seek him, he will be found of thee; but if thou forsake him, he will cast thee off for ever” (1 Chronicles 28:9). The God who reads the heart is the God who lets himself be found.

Yes. Scripture says God knows our words before they reach the tongue, our needs before we ask, and our days before we were born, and it never pictures a thought that could take him by surprise. “For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether” (Psalm 139:4). “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him” (Matthew 6:8). “Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written” (Psalm 139:16). The Bible does not explain how he knows a thought ahead of us; it simply says that “his understanding is infinite” (Psalm 147:5) and that he understands our thought “afar off.”

David answers with wonder: “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it” (Psalm 139:6).

He does, and the Bible shows him doing it. Hannah, childless and grieving, prayed in the house of the Lord at Shiloh. “Hannah, she spake in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard” (1 Samuel 1:13). The priest Eli thought she was drunk. “I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink,” she told him, “but have poured out my soul before the LORD” (1 Samuel 1:15). God heard that silent prayer, and Samuel was born.

Jesus teaches us to pray where no one else can see: “enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly” (Matthew 6:6). Prayer in secret needs no audience but the Father who sees in secret. And when we have no words at all, Paul says, “the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit” (Romans 8:26–27). The prayer we cannot put into words is still heard, and it is the Spirit himself who prays it.

Again and again the Gospels say so. When the scribes silently accused him of blasphemy for forgiving a paralysed man’s sins, “Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?” (Matthew 9:4; see Luke 5:22). In Jerusalem many believed in him, but “Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men, … for he knew what was in man” (John 2:24–25). The Gospels give him the knowledge Solomon said belonged to God alone, which is part of what Christians mean in confessing him as God.

The most tender of these moments comes after the resurrection. Peter had denied Jesus three times, and three times by the lake Jesus asked him, “Lovest thou me?” Peter, grieved, could only throw himself on what Jesus already knew: “Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee” (John 21:17). The knowledge he might have dreaded was the only ground he had left to stand on. Jesus answered, “Feed my sheep.”

It can, and Scripture does not pretend otherwise. “All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (Hebrews 4:13). Every one of us has thoughts we would not want read aloud. The fear in that verse is honest.

But Hebrews does not leave us there. The very next lines say: “we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy” (Hebrews 4:15–16). The eyes that see everything belong to the One who has felt what we feel. John speaks to the believer whose own conscience will not stop accusing: “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things” (1 John 3:20). God knows more about us than our harshest thought, and he knows it with mercy.

Pope Benedict XVI, preaching on Psalm 139 in 2005, said that God’s presence in it “is neither threatening nor inspectorial,” and he called the psalm “a song of trust.” Charles Spurgeon, the Baptist preacher, read its closing prayer the same way: “What a mercy that there is one being who can know us to perfection!” To be known completely is frightening only until we learn who it is that knows us.

Yes, and he judges them with mercy. Jesus taught that sin begins inside us: “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Paul looks to the day when the Lord “will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts” (1 Corinthians 4:5). Our thoughts matter to God.

Yet Scripture also tells us how sin grows, and that is a mercy to anyone troubled by thoughts they did not choose. “Every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin” (James 1:14–15). A thought that arrives uninvited and is turned away has not been welcomed and nursed. Jesus himself was “in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). Paul’s word for the struggle is “bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5), a daily work, and God watches it with a father’s patience: “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust” (Psalm 103:13–14). The same verse in Corinthians that speaks of hidden things brought to light ends with a promise: “and then shall every man have praise of God.”

The Bible never says he can. Solomon’s prayer gives that power to God alone, “for thou, even thou only, knowest the hearts of all the children of men” (1 Kings 8:39). We take this up in can angels read your mind?

Augustine, remembering the years when he sought God “according to the sense of the flesh,” wrote in his Confessions, “You were more inward to me than my most inward part; and higher than my highest.” The God who hears our thoughts is not listening from outside the door.

Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite, wrote of a prayer made of thought more than words: “mental prayer is nothing else, in my opinion, but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him Who, we know, loves us.” In the Orthodox Church the best-known prayer of the silent heart is the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner,” repeated quietly through the day. The Orthodox Church in America calls it “the form of invocation used by those practicing mental prayer, also called the ‘prayer of the heart.’” Its last words echo the tax collector in the temple, who would not lift his eyes and prayed, “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13).

Near the start of the Communion service in the Book of Common Prayer, Anglicans pray a collect built on this truth, the Collect for Purity: “ALMIGHTY God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.” The collect and other prayers like it are gathered in our prayers for purity. In the Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, Psalm 139 is prayed at Evening Prayer on the Wednesday of the fourth week, so the Church hears David’s words as the day ends. And there is the psalmist’s short prayer, which any of us can say before we speak: “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer” (Psalm 19:14).

We can pray the end of Psalm 139 the same way, tonight and every night, as David learned to: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23–24).

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