Love Quote by Thomas Brooks

Prayer, in Thomas Brooks's hands, stops being a religious transaction and becomes an interior diagnostic. "God hears no more than the heart speaks" is less a comfort than a warning: the problem isn't that heaven is far away, it's that the self is unavailable. Brooks, a Puritan divine writing in an age obsessed with spiritual authenticity, distrusts the easy performance of piety - the polished words, the public posture, the rote devotion. He collapses the distance between speaker and listener until what's left is almost brutally intimate: your real audience is the God who can only be "reached" by what is already true in you.

The line works by flipping the usual hierarchy. Omniscience is supposed to mean God hears everything; Brooks insists that God "hears" only what the heart is willing to articulate. It's a rhetorical paradox that smuggles in a psychological claim: silence of conscience becomes silence in prayer. "If the heart be dumb" doesn't just mean emotionally repressed; it suggests a moral muteness - a refusal to name desire, sin, grief, gratitude. In that sense, "God will certainly be deaf" is not theology as limitation but theology as mirror. Divine deafness is the felt experience of spiritual self-deception.

The subtext is pastoral and disciplinary at once. Brooks isn't trying to make believers eloquent; he's trying to make them honest. In a culture where religion could be social capital, he raises the stakes: the only speech that counts is inward speech, and if you can't speak there, no amount of external devotion will move the needle.