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Saint John of Tobolsk, known in the world as Ioann Maximovitch, was born in 1651 in Nizhyn in the Chernihiv region of Left-Bank Ukraine, into a family of the local Orthodox gentry. His father was Maxim Vasilievich Maximovitch. He was educated at the Kiev Collegium, later called the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, then the principal centre of Orthodox higher learning in Eastern Europe. There he studied theology, philosophy, Latin and rhetoric at a time when the Orthodox Church in the region was defending its identity amid Uniate and Catholic pressures from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and was also experiencing a revival of scholarship and preaching.

After teaching at the academy he entered monastic life, receiving the name John at tonsure, and was ordained a hieromonk. He became known as a preacher and was appointed abbot of several monasteries, among them the Svensky Monastery and the Eletsky Dormition Monastery in Chernigov. Toward the end of the seventeenth century he was consecrated Archbishop of Chernigov. In that see he founded a theological school, encouraged the printing of Orthodox books and continued his own spiritual writing. The work most closely associated with him is the Iliotropion, a treatise on aligning the human will with the will of God that drew on earlier sources and later became a standard text of Russian Orthodox ascetic reading.

In 1711 he was appointed Metropolitan of Tobolsk and All Siberia, a vast missionary diocese on the expanding eastern frontier of the Russian state. Siberia then contained Russian settlers, Cossacks and many indigenous peoples. John undertook the founding of churches and schools, the training of clergy and charitable work among the poor. He was noted for personal austerity, for interceding with officials on behalf of the oppressed, and for resisting the exploitation of native communities. Accounts from his lifetime already spoke of healings and other signs attributed to his prayers.

He died in Tobolsk on 10 June 1715 and was buried in the Sophia-Dormition Cathedral. Miracles were reported at his tomb and his relics were later found incorrupt. Local veneration continued for two centuries until the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a hierarch and wonderworker in 1916, fixing his principal feast on the day of his repose. He is remembered especially in Siberia as a missionary bishop who combined monastic spirituality with pastoral care of a frontier flock.