What Daniel 9 Teaches Us About Living Without Pretence
TL;DR: To be truly honest, you need to start with an honest view of who God is, his discipline, his mercy, and his goodness, before you can be genuinely honest about who you are. The gospel of Jesus makes this kind of radical honesty possible by removing the shame that drives us to pretend.
Honesty is harder than it looks. Most of us would say we value it, and most of us would also admit we fall short of it — not just with others, but with ourselves. We perform. We posture. We carefully manage how we appear, both to the people around us and, if we're being really honest, to God. But what does it actually mean to live an honest life?
Daniel 9:1–19 offers one of the most striking examples of raw, unfiltered honesty in the entire Bible. In this passage, the prophet Daniel is reading the book of Jeremiah and is confronted with the reality of his people's failure before God. What follows is a prayer, eloquent and anguished, humble and earnest, that models what genuine honesty looks like. It's not therapy-speak or vague self-awareness. It's a person who actually sees themselves clearly, because they first see God clearly.
At Redeemer, our church in Manchester, we recently preached through this passage as part of our Daniel series, and the themes it raises feel urgently relevant to everyday life. How do we escape the performance? How do we stop hiding? How do we become people who are genuinely, freely honest?
The Empire of Pride: Why Honesty Is So Difficult
Before we can understand what honesty looks like, we need to understand what gets in its way.
The word "confess" tells us something important. We don't just "share" our sins the way we share what we had for breakfast — we confess them, as though they're evidence in a police interview. The very existence of that word reveals something about us: vulnerability feels dangerous. Weakness feels like defeat. So we go to enormous lengths to avoid it.
This is what the Bible calls pride. And pride is far more than being a bit boastful at a dinner party. As Tim Keller observes, pride gets no pleasure from simply having something. It only finds satisfaction in having more of it than someone else. Pride is the relentless need to come out on top in every invisible comparison we run in our heads.
Pride blinds us. It drives us inward, making every conversation, every relationship, every decision orbit around ourselves. It sets us on a track, a one-way track towards what we might call an empire of self: a world constructed by our ego, where we are always the central character, always managing the narrative, always avoiding the moment when the curtain gets pulled back.
The troubling thing is that this empire isn't somewhere out there in the world. It's in here, in us. We're born into it. We drift back to it whenever life is on autopilot.
Starting With God: Being Honest About Who He Is
Daniel's prayer doesn't begin with Daniel. That's the first and most countercultural move he makes. Even in confession, even in a moment of genuine vulnerability, we have a remarkable capacity to make it about ourselves. Daniel resists that. He starts with God.
God Reveals Himself — We Don't Invent Him
For Daniel, it's reading Jeremiah that sets everything in motion. And that's significant. He doesn't come up with his own idea of God. He reads what God has said about himself. This matters enormously, because coming up with our own version of God is precisely how we get into a mess.
Consider the alternatives. The secular worldview, broadly speaking, works on the logic that if you do enough good, you become good. But who decides how much is enough? When can you rest? And isn't it rather convenient that you get to be the judge? In this framework, whether you call it religious or not, you end up functionally being your own god. It's attractive but it's exhausting and it offers no real security.
Other worldviews operate similarly. Even within sincere religious traditions, the logic of "do good to be good" leaves no room for genuine grace…for receiving something good that you haven't earned. And then there's the more contemporary god of personal desire: just be true to yourself, follow your heart. But our desires contradict each other constantly. Our hearts point in too many directions at once to be a reliable compass.
Daniel prays to Yahweh, the God of the Bible. And in doing so, he opens himself up to an encounter with a God who is genuinely multi-dimensional.
God Lovingly Disciplines
Daniel's prayer acknowledges, in verse 11, that God's discipline has come upon his people. And this might sound uncomfortable but there's a crucial distinction to make. An indifferent parent lets their children do whatever they like. A loving parent directs their children, even when it means consequences.
Proverbs 3:11–12 puts it plainly: the Lord disciplines those he loves. Discipline in its truest form is an expression of care, it's a parent trying to keep a child on a good path rather than a destructive one. When we face consequences from God, the right posture isn't resentment but trust: this too is for our good.
God Is Merciful and Forgiving
At the same time (and this is important!) Daniel's prayer explicitly celebrates God's mercy. In verse 9 he prays: "The Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even though we have rebelled against him."
Some of us struggle more with accepting discipline. Others struggle more with accepting forgiveness. Probably most of us wrestle with both at different times. But through Jesus, God the Father looks at us and declares us clean. The cross is the proof: if Jesus died, he took our sins. If he rose, we are forgiven. Psalm 103 captures it beautifully: as far as east is from west, so far has God removed our wrongdoings from us.
If you find this hard to believe about yourself, this article on what it means to be a Christian might be a helpful place to start.
God Only Does Good
Daniel 9:14 states it simply: "the Lord our God is righteous in everything he does." Everything. Not just the pleasant things, but all of it. This doesn't mean everything looks good, or feels good in the moment — but you can stake your life on the fact that if God is doing it, it is good.
This is a God who disciplines and forgives. Who is firm and tender. Who holds you accountable and runs to meet you. He is not one-dimensional. And the closer we get to a God like this, the safer it is to be honest.
Being Honest With Who We Are
Here's the logic: if God is truly like this, if he disciplines us because he loves us, forgives us completely through Jesus, and only ever does good, then we don't have to perform anymore. We are freed for honesty. We don't have to do good in order to be good, because through Jesus, we are made good. That changes everything.
It's what makes it possible to say what Daniel says in verse 5 with such disarming simplicity: "we have sinned and done wrong." No spin. No qualifications. Just honest.
We Don't Listen
In verse 6, Daniel confesses that God's people haven't listened to the prophets — from kings to ordinary people, God spoke and they ignored it. For us today, the Bible is God still speaking. And there are two ways we don't listen: we simply don't read it; or we read it and don't live it. As any parent knows, "you're not listening!" doesn't mean "you can't hear the words." It means "you're not acting on what I've said."
If you want to understand what sin actually is, it helps to see it first and foremost as a failure to listen, a turning away from a voice that loves us.
We're Unfaithful
Daniel also describes his people as "unfaithful", a deeply relational word. We're in a relationship with God, and we go elsewhere. We chase after other things: status, comfort, the approval of others, the feeling of being in control. These things aren't always bad in themselves, but when they replace God at the centre, we've been unfaithful to the one who loves us most. And if you've ever been cheated on, you have the tiniest glimpse of what that costs.
We've Rebelled
And lest we tell ourselves this all just happens to us passively, Daniel uses the word "rebelled." Rebellion isn't accidental. It has volition. Our sin may feel like drifting, but if we're being honest, it is an active running away from God and towards something else.
The Result: Shame
Verses 7 and 8 repeat the phrase "covered with shame." Shame is what makes you hide. It's what makes you feel fundamentally broken rather than simply having done something wrong. Guilt says, I did something bad. Shame says, I am something bad. And sin—because it's not just rule-breaking but heart-breaking—produces exactly this.
Pride, Self-Loathing, and the Only Healthy Alternative
There are two common responses to our failure, and neither is healthy.
Pride responds with denial: not quick to ask forgiveness, bristling when mistakes are pointed out, always finding a way to come out looking acceptable. It's an unhealthy confidence, a superiority complex.
Self-loathing responds with collapse: always pointing out how inadequate you are, never moving forward because you're too busy cataloguing your failures. It looks humble, but it's actually another form of self-obsession. An inferiority complex.
Both, oddly enough, have the same root: thinking about ourselves more than we think about God. We're either convinced we're too good, or convinced we're too bad. Either way, we've put ourselves at the centre.
The only healthy alternative is to surrender: to place both our pride and our self-loathing under God. A genuinely healthy person is confident because they know they are loved, and humble because they know God is better than them. They don't avoid their failings, they welcome honest feedback because they're not threatened by it. They don't wallow in their inadequacy, they move forward because they know God is sufficient.
This is what repentance opens up. Far from being a gloomy act of self-flagellation, repentance is actually a kind of rebellion — a refusal to stay in the empire of pride and shame, a turning back towards the God who is good. To repent is to rebel against the darkness. And if you want to understand what it looks like to actually rest in God rather than striving to earn his approval, that shift begins here.
The Cross Changes Everything
All of this flows from one place: the cross.
We aren't good enough to bring ourselves to God so he brought himself to us. Jesus went through weakness he didn't possess in himself, because of the weakness we spend our lives denying. He took on shame that belonged to us so that goodness could belong to us. The punishment we deserved fell on Christ, not on us.
This means the equation of life is permanently reordered. It's not: do good → be good. It's: you are made good through Jesus → now you can live accordingly. That goodness is real. It’s not the kind you calculate or perform, but the kind that came from heaven to earth for you.
No longer covered in shame, but wrapped in his love. That is what makes radical honesty possible.
A Community of Rebels
Redeemer is a church in Manchester that believes exactly this: we are a community of people who are honest about our weakness, our sin, our need, because we know we are held by a God who disciplines and loves and forgives and rescues us. People who don't need to perform for each other because they've stopped performing for God.
This kind of honesty isn't just personally liberating. It's countercultural. In a world that monetises image and rewards performance, a community of people who are genuinely, freely, unashamedly honest is a profound witness to something different.
Weakness is the way. And our Lord leads us.
FAQ
What does it mean to be truly honest according to the Bible? Biblical honesty goes deeper than simply telling the truth to others. It means seeing yourself clearly — your sin, your weakness, your need — without either minimising it (pride) or catastrophising it (self-loathing). Daniel 9 models this: honest about who God is, then honest about who we are in light of that.
Why is honesty so difficult for most people? The manuscript of the sermon draws on the concept of pride, not just arrogance, but the deep human instinct to avoid weakness. We fear vulnerability, so we build what the sermon calls an "empire of pride": a life structured around managing how others perceive us. This is an instinct we're all born with and drift back to constantly.
What's the difference between guilt and shame? Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am something bad. Guilt can lead to healthy repentance and change. Shame tends to make us hide, isolate, and avoid God. The gospel addresses both: it provides forgiveness for what we've done and a new identity for who we are.
Is repentance just feeling sorry for your sins? Not quite. Repentance literally means a turning, a reorientation of direction. It's not just regret; it's actively re-aligning yourself with God. The sermon frames it positively: repentance is a rebellion against the empire of pride and shame, a return to the God who loves you.
How does the gospel make honesty possible? Because Jesus took the shame and punishment we deserved, we no longer have to earn our standing before God. This removes the pressure that drives performance and hiding. If you are already made good through Jesus, you don't need to pretend to be good — and that freedom is the foundation of genuine honesty.
Can someone be too self-critical to benefit from this? Yes. The sermon addresses both pride (too high a view of yourself) and self-loathing (too low a view). Both are ultimately self-centred, just in different directions. The gospel invites both the arrogant and the self-loathing to stop making themselves the centre of the story, and to find their identity in who God says they are instead.
Where can I find out more about these ideas? You're welcome to visit Redeemer Church Manchester on a Sunday morning, we meet at Oswald Road Primary School, M21 9DW at 10am. You can also explore more articles on faith and Christian living at redeemermcr.com/articles.