What Good Can I Do This Day?

Thoughts on Acts 10:38

Founding Father John Quincy Adams gave his life to his faith, his family, and his country. He lived to be eighty years old and actively spent more than sixty of those years for the benefit of others. His service included diplomatic missions to five nations, serving as a state senator, US Senator, Secretary of State, and US President. And while every other president before and after him permanently retired from public life after leaving office, John Quincy Adams did not. On retirement, he was elected to the US House of Representatives, where he would spend nine terms, eventually dying in the Capitol. Although he declared “I had not the slightest desire to be elected to Congress,”¹ he nevertheless served because his neighbors desired his help and elected him for that purpose. Adams believed that it was his Christian duty to serve when others called rather than following his own personal wish to retire to a quiet unencumbered life.

In Congress, he took up the fight to end slavery at a time when the overwhelming majority in Congress did not want to even discuss the subject. He undertook a relentless personal crusade to secure the Declaration of Independence’s promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all individuals, regardless of race. But by choosing that path, he had chosen a difficult road. As he lamented, “The best actions of my life make me nothing but enemies.”² Yet he did not quit, for he believed that “his service belonged to the nation.”³

He was consistently on the front lines in any quest to improve the lives of citizens and combat injustice. When he was seventy-four and had been fighting brutal congressional battles for over a decade, he wrote:

I deem it the duty of every Christian man, when he betakes himself to his nightly pillow, in self-examination to say, “What good have I done this day? Ay! And what evil have I done that may be repaired or repented of?” Nor should he rise from that pillow the next morning till after the inquiry, “What good can I do, and to whom, this day?” I have made this my rule for many years, with superadded prayer to the Lord of all – the Giver of every good gift for light [James 1:17]—for discernment, for guidance, for self-control, for a grateful heart to feel and acknowledge all His blessings, for humble resignation to His will, and submission to His chastisements. . . .Jesus Christ went about doing good [Acts 10:38]; I would do the same.⁴

John Quincy Adams understood that God had placed each of us here not for our own pleasure, but so that we could serve and help others. May the Spirit of God anoint us as well to imitate Jesus and personally “go about doing good.”

Endnotes

¹ John Quincy Adams, diary entry for September 18, 1830, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1876), 8:240.

²Adams, diary entry for October 25, 1833, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, ed. Adams (1876), 9:26.

³ Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), 1:92.

⁴ Adams, diary entry for November 16, 1842, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, ed. Adams (1876), 11:269-270.