<p>1:35<em> And in the morning, a great while before daybreak, he rose up and went out, and departed into a deserted place; and there prayed</em>-Is. 50:4 prophesies of the Lord Jesus that morning by morning, God awoke His ear &quot;to learn as a disciple&quot;. That last phrase is surely to signal the intended similarities between the Lord's path of growth, and that of all disciples. The next two verses go on to predict that because of this morning-by-morning teaching process, &quot;I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair; I hid not my face from shame and spitting&quot; (Is. 50:5,6). Thus we come to the cross, the life of cross carrying, as the end result of our morning reflections. It was from His own experience that the Lord could bid us take up our cross- <em>His</em> cross- each morning. The Lord's attitude to prayer was radical in itself. The observant Jew prayed three times / day, the first and last prayers being merely the recital of the <em>shema</em>. Yet Jesus spent hours in those morning and evening prayers (Mk. 1:35; 6:46). Perhaps He was motivated in His prayers by the lengthy implications of the fact that Yahweh is indeed one, and this demands so much of us. &nbsp;</p>