Our role in prayer is actually just to receive it passively and allowing god to work.

hallesby analogy: man with tubercolosis exposed himself in sunshine and then recover. he does not need to understand the effect of the sun's ray, nor he needs to depend upon the feeling that the experience give, or the will to become well.

"On the contrary, the treatment is most successful if the patients lie very quietly and are passive, exerting neither their intellects nor their wills. it is the sun which effects the cure. All the patients need to do is to be in the sun. Prayer is just as simple."

"To pray is nothing more involved than to lie in the sunshine of his grace, to expose our distress of body and soul to those healing rays which can in a wonderful way counteract and render ineffective the bacteria of sin."

Hallesby - Prayer