Most people have the relation between understanding and prayer completely backwards.
They believe that prayer should follow from an understanding of God and his purposes, and so they set themselves the almost impossible task of reinventing Christianity for themselves. They avoid the common prayer of the Church, despite the fact that such prayer has been offered by two thousand years of Christians. Even more telling, they ignore the fact that the common prayer of the Church began with our Lord and his Apostles, so that it forms the bridge to almost another two thousand years of loving and serving God that began with Abraham and the patriarchs. Four thousand years of the condensed worship of God is a powerful aid to loving and serving God, but people will persist in trying to dream up a religion of their own. The best of them will scour the Scriptures hour after hour, trying to determine for themselves what must be known and believed about God before they begin to pray.