Daniel 6:4 –Then the presidents and princes sought to find occasion against Daniel concerning the kingdom; but they could find none occasion nor fault; forasmuch as he was faithful, neither was there any error or fault found in him.

Shakespeare gave some wise words to Polonius, The Lord Chancellor in Hamlet, to give to his son Laertes:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not be false to any man.

It speaks to integrity. Integrity is an increasingly rare quality these days. According to a survey published by Gallup in October, 73% of Americans say corruption is pervasive in the USA. Cheating and copying have become routine in schools and colleges. Curiously, when it comes to personal relationships, though, it seems that most of us still have high expectations! What lies behind the contradiction?
Most of us are very good at compartmentalizing — putting things in a box. We can separate our view of relationships from our view of work, or church, or social life …
There is, however, no room for compartmentalization if our standard is Biblical integrity. Luke 16:10 says “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much.” it’s a thing that I think of as being “the whole package”. It’s really no good having 90% integrity.
Daniel was the whole package. And he must have built his character early. It seems clear that he was a youth when taken to Babylon — and the first thing he did was to “purpose in his heart not to defile himself”. He took a big, bold decision not to eat the special food on offer because it was not clean.
Daniel faced opposition in his “career” too, which is where the verse at the head of this piece comes in. Darius purposed to put Daniel in charge of the kingdom — and the other officials really wanted to prevent it. They couldn’t find a spot on his record.
Daniel had really proved himself time and again. When he was asked by the previous king, Belshazzar, to interpret the “writing on the wall” he didn’t succumb to the temptation to sugar the pill. He told Belshazzar the blunt truth — even though the fury of a king could easily mean death.
There were no “integrity-excluded” compartments in Daniel’s life. There are other great examples in the Bible — think about Joseph who refused Potiphar’s wife, Job who refused to curse God no matter how bad things got, or Peter who was such a leader in the early church. Peter, of course, gives us one more lesson — that failure doesn’t necessarily mean a loss of integrity, but a starting point for building on a solid foundation.

So often nowadays it seems leaders are not men of integrity. They fail and brush it aside as though it were nothing. What are we doing to build character into the generations to come? Teaching them about these Biblical men of integrity, and maybe even old Polonius, would be a good start!