Don't Leave God Alone

Don't Leave God Alone is the book's governing rule of persistent prayer: believers are urged to keep pursuing God rather than withdrawing from Him, and to remain in fellowship until His power, blessing, freedom, or intervention becomes visible. The principle turns prayer from a brief religious obligation into a determined relationship, joining private devotion with public consequences and personal faith with the welfare of families, churches, cities, and nations.

Definition and Spiritual Logic

Don't Leave God Alone begins with the conviction that God desires fellowship rather than distance. In the opening account, Hank Kunneman is about to leave his prayer and study room when he hears the plea, "DON'T LEAVE! PLEASE don't leave!" He understands this as a cry from God's heart and returns to prayer, even though he has already set aside an hour and has a full agenda waiting. The scene establishes the rule's central tension: ordinary schedules, distraction, disappointment, and spiritual fatigue all press the believer toward departure, while God calls for continued attention.

The rule does not mean treating God as reluctant or forcing Him through human strength. It means refusing to abandon communion when prayer feels unrewarded. Kunneman describes a six-month period in which God seemed absent, prayer felt boring, he repeatedly fell asleep while praying, and he saw no answers. He went to a camp for three days of fasting and prayer, even bringing a sack of snacks in case the valley and drought continued. When he asked God to bring nearby deer closer as a sign that He was listening, the deer ran in the opposite direction. The comic disappointment becomes a test of persistence rather than proof that prayer is useless.

The book contrasts this pursuit with the tendency to hide. After Adam and Eve sinned, they covered themselves and withdrew from God's presence instead of returning to fellowship. Kunneman treats that withdrawal as another form of leaving God alone: shame and fear turn failure into separation. The remedy is to run toward God rather than toward a symbolic fig-leaf covering. Even when believers have failed in prayer, the rule tells them not to avoid God because they feel embarrassed or imagine that He is angry.

Prayer as Persistent Action

The principle is expressed through asking, seeking, and knocking. Jesus' teaching in Luke 11 is presented as a threefold movement: believers come to God with requests, seek Him daily as a friend, and knock persistently because the answer lies beyond the door. The related idea of importunity is defined as being shameless, bold, determined, pressing, entreating, and persistent in requesting. The purpose is to form people who pray without fainting and who refuse to abandon their petition merely because the first response appears negative.

Kunneman illustrates this persistence through a personal story involving a gondola ride. He was hot and wanted the driver to change the course, so he continued pressing until the driver changed his mind. The narrator admits that the persistence may have been inconsiderate, but uses the episode to explain the rule's practical force: determination can outlast an initial refusal. Applied to prayer, the lesson is to continue pressing through opposition and exhaustion rather than interpreting repeated obstacles as a final answer.

The rule also requires action, not merely an inward wish for change. Bartimaeus is presented as someone who had to prevent Jesus from passing beyond his reach, while the removal of an old garment symbolizes laying aside former mind-sets, habits, choices, and actions. Kunneman recounts speaking to a skeptical man in a church's back row, naming the cigarette brand in his pocket and telling him that God wanted to help him quit and transform his life. The man rose and rejected the familiar old lifestyle. Change, in this framework, is renewed daily; a single decision without continuing action cannot produce the desired result.

Biblical Patterns and Tests of Persistence

Moses supplies the clearest biblical model. When God told him to leave Him alone, Moses pleaded with the Lord rather than withdrawing. The book presents Moses' intercession as an interruption of the devil's plan to keep God and humanity separated. It also connects the principle with Abraham's intercession and argues that the cry of the righteous must be louder than the cry of evil if evil is not to prevail.

The same logic is applied to national crisis. While praying for the United States, Kunneman describes sensing God's presence and hearing that the nation was being given another chance, as Nineveh had been. He interprets this as evidence that intercession can affect a nation's future and urges believers to stand for their nation rather than accept predictions of destruction. Prayer is likewise linked to the condition of cities: persistent intercession is said to confront violence, profanity, corrupt wisdom, defiled sanctuaries, iniquities, and terror or fear.

The book presents Florida's hurricanes as a collective test of this rule. In 2004, Kunneman prophesied that Florida would face two back-to-back hurricanes and that prayer could keep them away, but the first prayers did not prevent the storms. The following year, he again named a storm and a particular month. Hundreds prayed fervently and determined that the storm would not enter as before; it failed to hit them. Kunneman later says that in 2006 no major hurricanes struck the United States, attributing the difference to people praying collectively, individually, and fervently. The episode makes persistence a communal discipline: the decisive change is not simply that prayer occurred, but that people refused to accept the previous result as the final one.

Other biblical scenes reinforce the pattern through danger and delay. In Acts 12, after Herod had killed James and imprisoned Peter, the early church responded through sustained prayer rather than a natural political solution. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego likewise remain faithful under extreme pressure. In the fiery furnace, they fall prostrate before the Son of God rather than bowing to the image demanded by the king; the flames kill the soldiers who throw them in, yet the three worshipers emerge without burned hair, scorched clothing, or even the smell of smoke. Their worship is therefore treated as a form of steadfast refusal that opens into deliverance.

Private Fellowship and Public Power

A central consequence of Don't Leave God Alone is the connection between hidden prayer and visible power. Jesus' instruction to pray in secret is read as a promise that the Father will reward private devotion openly. Kunneman recalls spending extra time fasting and praying before a conference; when he later entered the auditorium, thousands experienced what he describes as a strong manifestation of God's power, with ushers and whole sections of people falling and shaking under the anointing. He attributes the public effect to the private preparation.

The same principle is applied to Jesus' wilderness experience. After time alone with God, Jesus returns to Galilee in the power of the Spirit and begins a public ministry marked by authority. Kunneman therefore treats the prayer room as a place of preparation rather than retreat. His own prayer places have included fields, forests, garages, tents, cabins, sheds, and a car. The variety of locations underscores that the essential matter is not a special building but the deliberate shutting off of distraction and the decision to remain available to God.

The book also describes prayer as accumulating spiritual force. Sacrificial giving and persistent prayer are compared to filling a water balloon: the more water it contains, the greater its impact when released. In the same way, a growing heavenly rain cloud eventually pours out blessings with enough force to leave the believer, in the book's image, walking through an excess of blessing. Elisha becomes the model for this accumulation because he follows Elijah through successive places of testing instead of quitting when he has an apparent reason to stop.

Deliverance, Blessing, and the Final Invitation

Don't Leave God Alone is also presented as a practical rule for deliverance. The book lists six linked responses: refuse to leave God alone, use the Word of God and the name of Jesus, believe that the Lord wants freedom, stand one's ground, refuse to give up on deliverance, and remain in a church with an anointed pastor who can help. The promise is grounded in Jesus' declaration that those whom the Son sets free are truly free. The believer is told to cry out like Samson, worship like the three Hebrew youths, and continue until enemies turn back.

The rule extends beyond immediate answers to the revival of what appears dead. Mary and Martha's experience with Lazarus becomes a pattern for dead dreams, dead desires, hopes that seem to have begun to stink, and prayers that have not unfolded as expected. The instruction is not to blame God, take offense, or give up when the delay has become painful, but to keep believing until the dream comes alive. The imagery of graveclothes and release makes persistence a movement from confinement into a new stage of life.

At the book's conclusion, the principle becomes a direct decision and an evangelistic invitation. Readers who have never known Jesus Christ personally are urged to begin a new life of daily fellowship, repentance, forgiveness, and pursuit. The suggested prayer commits the believer to seek God, receive forgiveness, confess faith in Jesus Christ's death and resurrection, ask the Holy Spirit to fill and draw the believer closer, and continue until blessing is received. The closing appeal identifies the rule as both a devotional practice and a public declaration of identity: a person becomes a Christian, a lover and follower of Jesus Christ, by choosing not to leave God alone.

In this final form, Don't Leave God Alone gathers the book's recurring contrasts into one command. Silence is set against the cry of the righteous, withdrawal against fellowship, fear against authority, passive disappointment against determined pursuit, and private prayer against public power. Its decisive claim is that freedom and blessing are found when believers include God in every part of life and continue pressing into Him until circumstances change.