“You cannot live a double life; be a Christian in the church and an ordinary person in the world.” Many of us try to have it both ways. We attend church on Sundays and then live out the rest of our week completely apart from God and His ways. The weight just grows heavier and heavier as we try to live a Christian life, but still continue to keep a foot firmly in the world. God wants all of our hearts, not just a piece. 

For Maxim, in his own words and in his story shared by an SGA-supported pastor below, he was living in both worlds. He found himself questioning why he had let himself get so caught up in ungodly ways. He wondered why he hadn’t kept his focus on Christ from the beginning. In the end, he realized that he was only speaking the words of being a believer, but not living it out in his life. 

God didn’t give up on Maxim though. He is always working in ways that we don’t understand. At an SGA-supported Summer Bible Camp, He was faithful to show Maxim true repentance. In that repentance, Max (his previous name) became Maxim. Spiritually, he was ready to be a new creation, and for him that meant a name change as well. Maxim now desires faithfulness through the reading of God’s Word and prayer. In his new life, he shares Christ with others. 

Please pray for the many SGA-supported Summer Bible Camps that continue to be a place where repentance of sins and faith in Christ is making many (both young and older) “new creations.”

Max is a disabled orphan, abandoned by his parents since infancy, initially living in a Baby House. Later, he lived in a boarding home for children with special developmental needs. Eight years ago, Max received holy water baptism. But over the past year, according to his own words, Max has weakened spiritually. There was a time when he did not want to attend church, participate in the ministry, abandoned daily reading and study of the Bible, and in general lost close fellowship with God. There was resentment, bitterness and misunderstanding in his heart: why it was so hard to work, why God did not answer prayers for marriage.

But on the last day of the camp, Max came forward at the evening service, wept and asked forgiveness from others for seeing him like that, and then prayed a prayer of repentance and renewal to God.

Greetings! My name is Maxim, I am from the city of Grodno. This is my eighth time at the camp, and I am grateful to God for the opportunity to come and hear the Word. I would like to tell you a little about myself and what prompted me to come out and repent, or rather, to renew my repentance. For a year and a half or two years I was cold, unwilling to serve, cowardly, and the emptiness that was inside of me was eating me up. I wasn’t serious about the Word of God, I wasn’t serious about ministry, and it all piled up like a snowball. At one point I realized: What am I doing? Where am I standing, and why am I acting this way? Where had I missed the focus on Christ? Where was the wrong turn I had taken?

This is the voice I heard at camp—to go out, be renewed, and repent. You cannot live a double life: be a Christian in the church and an ordinary person in the world. For a year and a half, this tormented me. I realized that I had to do something, but I didn’t know how to do it. At the camp, I decided that I couldn’t do it anymore and renewed my repentance. There was a moment there that wouldn’t let me pass it by. I realized that I was not a Christian if I acted like that. I am relieved now! Thank God that there is camp and that we can spend time like this, meditating especially on God’s Word and being renewed. Right now, I have taken a weeklong fast and am reading a Scripture passage—1 Corinthians 13:4-8. I want to commit my life to God, leave everything that has plagued me, and take it seriously! I don’t want to be the guy who was known as Max anymore! I want to become a man and make God proud of me, I want to be Maxim. May God help us all. Amen.

Maxim became cold spiritually, and for more than a year he could not recover. He said that God was deaf and did not hear his prayers: Maxim prayed for a wife. God did not answer. He prayed for a business. God did not answer, and he did not become a businessman. Maxim stopped praying and stopped reading the Bible. He went to the camp reluctantly. But God heard our prayers for Maxim. At the evening service, when the camp was closing, Maxim told me that he wanted to repent and needed it very much and did not want to live like that anymore. He took the microphone from me and in front of the whole camp he made a fervent prayer of repentance and renewal of commitment in tears.

After the camp and repentance Maxim had seven days of prayer and fasting, from morning to evening, about his spiritual condition. He began to read the Bible and preached about hope in God in church attendance. Praise God.

Several days later, we visited the orphanage for disabled orphans, where Max and other disabled people we have in our Bethany group were raised. Renewed Max preached to the disabled orphans since he himself is a disabled orphan. He read the prophet Isaiah 40:28-31. He talked about hope in God and how he himself had lost hope and found it after repentance. There was no stand, and I was Maxim’s Bible stand for the sermon. Then Maxim said to me, “I want to keep preaching Christ, I want to share my testimony and tell others about the dangers that await them without Jesus. You can call yourself a Christian but not be one!” I could not stop his fervor, and we went to other villages for a visit. I rejoice with tears in my eyes watching him and listening to his sermon. Pray that Maxim will remain “Maxim” and never become “Max” again.