Searches every word across every teaching, article, and Q&A on the site.
Searches every word across every teaching, article, and Q&A on the site.
Teacher: Pastor Paul LeBoutillier Pastor Paul: Hi everybody, this is kind of a special holiday edition of our Q&A, and instead of doing a Bible question Q&A, we're going to be talking about some personal questions that come our way from time to time. So this is going to be all personal questions. Sue: We've saved up a lot of them. No theology here. Pastor Paul: That's right. This is just kind of about our lives. Sue: This is for fun. The first question is from Kim, “Dear Pastor Paul, I would like to know how long you and Sue have been married and how did you meet?” Pastor Paul: Great question. We've been married for 47 years, almost 47 and a half years, believe it or not. And how did we meet? We went to high school together, and that's how we met. You like to tell people we met in the band room. Sue: I do. It's just kind of cute, I guess. Pastor Paul: It's one of those interesting things. Sue: Let me just say, you were an artist, and I was a musician, and you were painting a mural in the band room. Pastor Paul: Is that how you remember? Sue: Do you remember that? Pastor Paul: I do remember painting a mural. They asked me to paint a design on the wall of the band room, the old band room, and I did that. Sue: Yep, that's where it started. Pastor Paul: That's where it started. And you were probably 14 or 15 years old when we first met. Sue: I was probably 15. You've told the stories about the car and all that kind of stuff in some of your teachings. We don't have to go into all of that, but we've been married 47 years. Pastor Paul: And we are three years apart. There were actually two years in school years, but three years in age. Sue: All right. Devon asks you, “How long have you lived in Canada?” Pastor Paul: Interesting question, Devin. We don't live in Canada. We've never lived in Canada. And most of the people, I'm not going to say most, there's a good number of people who have made the assumption that we are from Canada based on two things, that I pastored for 35 years, Calvary Chapel Ontario, which of course, people assumed, was named after the province of Ontario, Canada. And second of all, because our last name is French Canadian. So I give people a lot of grace there to get it wrong, because those things do kind of go against us. But we pastored a church in Ontario, Oregon for 35 years. So we both were born and raised in Minnesota, USA, and we've lived in the United States our entire lives. Sue: But fun fact, your ancestry is French Canadian. And your most recent generations came from Quebec. So it's a really good guess. Pastor Paul: It is a good guess, I suppose. My relatives originally came from France, and then came to French speaking Canada, and then moved straight down kind of into Minnesota. I think my grandfather was the one who made his way down into Minnesota. Sue: I think so too. Pastor Paul: And then my dad was born in Minnesota. Sue: All right. Well, then Amanda says, “What are your favorite restaurants?” Pastor Paul: Favorite restaurants. We now live very close to an Olive Garden, which I love, and you do too. Sue: I do. Pastor Paul: So we like eating out. We call it our olive garden, because it's so close to our home. I mean, it's like walking distance from our home. So that's fun. Sue: I think that for most married couples, favorite foods and favorite restaurants, it's like you need to organize it in a Venn diagram. You know what a Venn diagram is? You have these two bubbles, all of my favorites, all of your favorites. Pastor Paul: How we overlap. Sue: And which ones are overlapping. And there aren't that many food groups that overlap. We both appreciate a good Mexican restaurant. Pastor Paul: Yeah, we do. Sue: We both like Italian. We like our Olive Garden. I have a lot of other foods in my bubble that... Pastor Paul: That I don't have. Sue: No, that aren't in yours. So they just hang out there until I'm with a girlfriend or something like that. Pastor Paul: I'm not into Asian food, and Sue likes Asian cuisine. So that's one of the ones that's outside. Sue: And the other thing about us is we don't love spending hundreds of dollars for dinner. Pastor Paul: No. Sue: We're very simple that way. In fact, our youngest son took me out on a fancy dinner date here about two years ago. And it was really fun and very sweet of him, but we just don't do that. We don't drop three digits often on a dinner for two. Pastor Paul: No. In fact, if it's cheaper, we're happier. Sue: We are. Pastor Paul: Usually, because we're kind of cheapskates. Sue: Now you know who we are. Pastor Paul: Sorry. Sue: “How did you both come to know the Lord?” Pastor Paul: That one's going to take a little longer. We've mentioned many times in our own teachings that we both kind of met the Lord in a more casual way as younger people. You were a bit younger, I think, than me. I'll let you speak for yourself. I was in my teens. I want to say I was about 15, maybe 16, I don't know. But I do remember even where I heard the gospel. Interesting fact, my family went to church every Sunday, but I didn't hear the gospel in church because we didn't go to an evangelical church. We went to a more mainline denominational church where the gospel wasn't emphasized. So it was really in high school when we had a Christian group come in and do what we used to call a Lyceum. Sue: Oh yeah, I remember that term. Pastor Paul: And usually they were on Friday, and it was a group. And they'd bring the whole school, and we'd come and sit in one half of the gymnasium in the bleachers, and people would put on a program. And this particular Christian group got into our high school. Of course, this is in the 70s. And they did some contemporary Christian music, and then they invited all the kids to come over to a nearby town. Again, it was a high school where they were going to do an evening, put on an evening program. And during that evening program, I remember hearing the gospel for the very first time. And I heard it in a way that really resonated with me because the speaker, after they got done doing their music, shared how Jesus suffered on the cross, and particularly how he cried out during that time on the cross, saying, ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’ I'd never really heard that in the way that he presented it. And I remember being profoundly affected. And I went home and really kind of resonated on that all night long. And then the next day, as I was getting dressed, I remember looking in the mirror as I was getting dressed, and just knowing in my heart that I was talking to the Lord. I remember just embracing the gospel. And I don't remember saying the sinner's prayer, but I just remember saying to the Lord, ‘Yes, I'll take that. I received that.’ And I knew that my sins were forgiven. Interestingly enough, that day forward, I knew that, I knew that I knew my sins were forgiven. And I have never once doubted it since I was 15 years old. Even during a course of time following, where I didn't really walk with the Lord very closely. I had a time where I kind of got into reading the Bible and that sort of thing. But we didn't really have great church options where we were growing up. Very, very small town. You lived on a farm. I lived in town. The town was 250 people. So there weren't a lot of church options. And I remember just kind of withering on the vine is probably the best way to put it. There wasn't internet back then. I attended a couple of Bible studies in high school, and they were interesting, but it didn't really get me jazzed. It wasn't until much later after we got married and were married for five years, in fact, that you and I had a personal revival. Sue: It's a good way to put it. Pastor Paul: And it surrounded the issue of our marriage. Our marriage wasn't doing that well, because we weren't living for the Lord for those first five years of our marriage. And when you don't live for the Lord, things you can expect them to go sour, and ours went sour. Sue: Self-centeredness, self-indulgence takes over. Pastor Paul: Worldliness, just total worldliness. Focus on the things that the world focuses on and we bought into all that. And of course, that didn't serve our marriage well at all. And when we both realized that our marriage was failing literally, that was kind of a wake-up call for us. Sue: Sure. Pastor Paul: And that's when we began to really walk with the Lord. Sue: I like that you share that it was really through a music concert that you were initially drawn to this place, because that's my testimony as well. Music is a very strong foundation through both of our experiences. Pastor Paul: It’s powerful. Sue: And for me, I was about eight years old. My family wanted to go to, we were going to a church that my mother had previously grown up in. It was a country church. And they were having a men's barbershop quartet concert. Pastor Paul: I would not believe otherwise that you could get saved through barbershop music. Sue: It's true. It happened. So I was probably about eight. It is so fascinating how even a very young person has a vivid memory of what's going on in your heart and in your mind. These men were performing, and they were singing. And I liked music even when I was young. And they were singing a song. I know the words to this. I could sing the tune. But the one part of the song, first I'll say the song was about a man who died and went to heaven. And presumably someone is there at the gates of heaven, checking on the list to see if his name is there. It's all done in the song. And the chorus of the song goes, ‘Sorry, I never knew you.’ Pastor Paul: Wow. Sue: And it was the point in the song was to say he never got saved. He never knew the Lord. The Lord didn't know him. He was turned away at heaven. Pastor Paul: Wow. That can really impact an eight-year-old child. Sue: And it did. And I remember, I can tell you how the building smelled. I can tell you which side of the aisle I was sitting on. Because in that moment, in my little heart, I said, that's never going to happen to me. I am never going to get to the gates of heaven and have them say, ‘Sorry, I never knew you’. Pastor Paul: And get turned away. Sue: And get turned away. It's like, I want God to know me and I want to know him. So we went home that night. And the part I don't recall so well is that I was sharing a room with my older sister and I expressed some of this to her and she goes, well, we just need to get mom. So my mom came and prayed with me. And I really do think I was born again at that time because that's what I wanted. An eight-year-old can say, I want to belong to God. Pastor Paul: Absolutely. Sue: And then fast forward and we go through the normal teenage struggles. We go through young married life. Like we say, living for ourselves and all that sort of thing. So I was about 22 years old when you and I were really struggling. We really kind of liked each other as friends. We just didn't want to be married anymore. Pastor Paul: We always got along. Sue: So there was this one particular evening when I was paging through the newspaper while you and I were having a conversation about how does one go about getting a divorce? Who do you go and see? How do you do this? So out of this side of my mouth, I'm saying, does one of us need to get a lawyer? And out of this side of my mouth, I'm saying, look, there's a concert at the high school. Should we go? Pastor Paul: A Christian concert. Sue: A Christian concert. And we did because we liked music. Pastor Paul: I remember saying that sounds like a good idea. Let's go to that concert. Sue: So we did. And for a few of you that are listening to this will know who the second chapter of Acts was. This concert was in about 1980 in the C.M. Russell Auditorium in Great Falls, Montana. Pastor Paul: Early 80s, 81 or so. Sue: And they did their whole concert. And then one of the group members, Annie Herring, who had just a very powerful and persuasive way of doing an altar call without asking people to go forward down to the altar. She asked us all to hold hands and across the whole auditorium. So you were sitting next to me. I was holding your hand and hand of the stranger girl next to me. And she just said, if you need, I don't know how her phrasing was, but if you want to respond to the Lord in some way, just squeeze the hand of the person you're holding. Pastor Paul: Of the person next to you. Sue: And I wasn't going to squeeze your hand because we were just talking about getting a divorce. So I squeezed the hand of the girl next to me. And I share this often that she was a bossy girl. Pastor Paul: Now, didn't her dad own the Christian bookstore in town? Sue: Yeah. She was the daughter of a prominent Christian family. They owned a standalone Christian bookstore in town, which I always think is very sweet that God arranged for me to be sitting right next to her. Most people, you squeeze their hand it's like, God bless you. But no, she was bossy. And she sat me down and probably you too. Pastor Paul: No, she sat you down specifically. Sue: And she didn't really try to dig out what was going on. She just said, you need to be in church on Sunday. And she took a scrap of paper, wrote down three churches in town and like the cross streets where they were. So there's no excuse. And she said, you pick one of these and you be there on Sunday morning. Pastor Paul: And we were. Sue: And we were and we did it and we never left. We were like at church on Sunday morning. And then I think we were hanging sheetrock or something on the next Friday. Pastor Paul: We were helping out at the church. I do remember even after this concert, it took you a little while to really be ready. I mean, we each had our moments of delay. I remember at that concert, I was broken to pieces. In fact, I was bawling my eyes out. Sue: You were broken, but you didn't squeeze anybody's hand. Pastor Paul: No. Sue: I was the one that was squeezing. Pastor Paul: Exactly. Sue: And you're right. It probably was about a two to three week process. Looking back on it, it seems instant. And that's because the Lord did such an amazing work of healing us. Pastor Paul: Yes, he did. Sue: And bringing us into just an entirely new orbit of a relationship with him and with each other. Pastor Paul: That's right. Sue: That doesn't mean we didn't have stumbles along the way as we had to go forward, but we've gone through enough marriage counseling and talking to people that we can look back and say that was nothing short of miraculous. Pastor Paul: The Lord kind of swooped in and just healed our relationship very quickly. We, however, had to then begin the process of learning how to be husband and wife in a biblical context, which we really knew very little about. I knew very little about what it meant to be a husband from a biblical understanding. In other words, what God expected out of me as a leader. I didn't really know those things and didn't always have the best examples. So that was challenging. Sue: So we both had an experience of a young salvation experience, and then a young adult personal revival. Pastor Paul: And thankfully, it happened in our 20s. We didn't have any children, which was probably better. We didn't drag kids through the mud of our mud, but we got pregnant after we had begun to walk with the Lord. And I thank the Lord for that. Sue: Well, this kind of plays into Thomas's question, “How did you know that God had given you a gift to teach the Bible?” Pastor Paul: Quite by accident, actually. After we got our lives, after the Lord began to bring healing, and we began attending church, and we were all in with the Lord, we started attending a fellowship. In fact, it was the first church on the list that gal gave you at that concert. We started going to this fellowship, which it was an independent, evangelical, charismatic church, and they were having a work day where they were doing work on the basement of the building. So we decided to volunteer on a Saturday. We had our Saturdays off. I was working in radio at the time. You were working in finance. I think maybe by that time you might have been at the utility company. Sue: I was working at the gas company. Pastor Paul: At that town. Anyway, this was in Montana. And we met, the pastor called us into his office, interestingly enough during that time, and just kind of on the basis of like to get to know you. But then he shared that there was a need in the church for some people to assist the youth group leader, who happened to be a young gal about our age. And he was explaining that she felt a bit overwhelmed being the leader of this youth group, which was senior high. And would we be interested in just kind of coming along and helping? I remember driving home that day and talking about it. And I wasn't that interested in doing it. But you said, ‘Oh, I'd love to. Let's do it.’ So I went along because you wanted to do it, honestly. And a big bump on the log that I was, I don't know what I wanted to do at that point. But anyway, we did. And the very first it was Wednesday night they met. And the very first Wednesday night, the gal who was leading the youth group met us and said, oh, I'm so glad you're here because I'm leaving. I want out of this ministry. Sue: I’m out of it. Pastor Paul: She wasn't leaving the church. She was leaving that ministry. And she's like, I'm giving this to you. I'm sure we had that deer in the headlight kind of a look on our faces because we literally had just come to the Lord and begun to walk with the Lord in a serious fashion. And we were thrust into this leadership role far before we should have been and began leading. I got to come up with some Bible studies. Well, I'm literally just learning the Bible myself. Sue: And you didn't have a Bible. Pastor Paul: Well, that's true. I had an old childhood that had been given to me as a child. I think it was a revised standard version or something like that. And I was given it when I was like 10 years old. And I didn't think that was probably the best Bible. I didn't have another Bible and I didn't really have a lot of money to buy any, because if you wanted a Bible back then, you had to go to the Christian bookstore and you had to lay out 30, 40 bucks for the bible. Sue: That's not the way I remember it. I remembered that the Bibles back then were like in the $80 range. Pastor Paul: Were they really? Sue: Yeah. They just had the really, really nice genuine leather ones and you bought me one of those. Pastor Paul: I did. Sue: I think the month after we started, then we both invested in good Bibles. Tell us where your first Bible came from. Pastor Paul: I ended up getting a Bible out of the lost and found. And it was a pew Bible and it was an NIV. I didn't know anything about the NIV, the new international version, knew nothing about it, but it looked good to me. And it wasn't the Bible necessarily that the pastor of that church or their translation rather that he spoke from or taught from or preached from. But it was good enough and I used it, and it was understandable to me. I needed an understandable Bible. So I grabbed a Bible out of the lost and found and started reading it. And I would read during like Monday, Tuesday, I'd read something, I'd learn something in the Bible. And on Wednesday, I'd teach it to the kids. And it was that fresh. But that was an exciting time in our lives because we were growing by leaps and bounds. We were in a church that was pretty animated. And we ended up finding out that it didn't fit us very well. But ultimately, it was a time of growth in our lives and that made it an exciting time. Sue: Well, what was interesting, we were in this very charismatic and animated church. And yet the Lord was personally sending us down to that bookstore from the parents of the bossy girl. And we were buying E.M. Bounds and C.S. Lewis and A.W. Tozer. If anybody had two initials and a last name, we bought them. Pastor Paul: That’s funny. Sue: And we were reading really, really weighty, deep theological things. Pastor Paul: That’s true. Sue: While we went to this church that was not quite so. Pastor Paul: In fact, it was back then that I got my first copy of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. And it was too deep for me. I remember I started reading it and then I thought... Sue: It's still a little too deep for me. Pastor Paul: I remember putting it away and thinking, oh, no. I was choking on it. So I put it away for probably 10 years. And then I pulled it out and it became one of my absolute all-time favorites. Sue: Oh, and John Stott. Pastor Paul: John Stott was another huge author in my life. You know I want to say something about that church that we first started going to after we really got serious with the Lord. I'm glad that we were thrust into a church environment where the gifts of the Holy Spirit were operational, first of all, accepted, and then operational. I'm glad we didn't get started in a church where the gifts of the Spirit were being ignored and that sort of thing, because I believe that once I started getting really, truly serious about studying through the Word of God, understanding it, having that past, that understanding of the gifts of the Holy Spirit going into then really studying the word diligently, I believe it gave me and us a much broader understanding of the revelation of what God was trying to communicate or is trying to communicate through the Scriptures. I really do. I'm thankful for that background. Sue: God is really good at weaving things together. Pastor Paul: For sure. Sue: Well, our last question, we'll kind of turn the corner here a little bit. Sandy says, “What traditions does your family have for the holidays?” Pastor Paul: We're big thanksgiving people. We've got four kids who are all grown, and they're all married now. And so they have responsibilities to two different families. Sue: This is a new one for us this year, because we're in a new home. And we are now closer to a bigger fraction of our family than what we've been before. So I just got busy and made a list of all of our traditional Thanksgiving foods and sent it out to everybody and say, what do you want to bring? Pastor Paul: It’s pretty fun. Sue: It is pretty fun. And it's really fun as our family grows and grows. I think we'll be 16 of us tomorrow on Thanksgiving. And that's with two of them missing. Two of them are on the East Coast. So in the past, we've kind of only done Thanksgiving with our family every other year in order to give our kids an opportunity to be with their other families sometimes and not kind of claim them all the time. And up until now, that has seemed to work out. So this is our year. So we're doing it up big. And I think it'll be really fun to come together. And I always do as the matriarch of the family, I always do that I make everybody say what they're thankful for. Pastor Paul: Yes, you do. Sue: And you have to admit, though, there are times when some really sweet things come out of the kids' mouths. Pastor Paul: You hear things that you wouldn't hear otherwise. Sue: That just don't happen in normal conversation. Pastor Paul: That's true. So we do Thanksgiving together. And we do celebrate the birth of Christ. And having been a pastor for 40 years, and particularly the last 35, where I was kind of the senior pastor of Calvary Chapel, Ontario. Christmas Eve was a huge deal for the church, because we hosted and put on a Christmas Eve candlelight service for all those years and it got huge. Sue: It did. Pastor Paul: I mean, we got to the in the last few years that I was pastoring Calvary Chapel Ontario, we would have 1000 plus people join us on Christmas Eve for our candlelight service and it was very simple. Sue: It was very simple, but it was an opportunity that you presented to your people. It was something that they could bring their unsaved or unchurched, as we say, friends and family, and it just became a tradition. And it was evangelistic in that way. Pastor Paul: It was and it was a whole family event. It was families and their kids. I did not teach or preach a message. We watched a couple of holiday specific videos, we sang Christmas carols. I gave a Christmas devotional. And then we turned off all the lights and lit candles and sang Silent Night, and it was precious. It was beautiful. And it became a tradition, not just for our family, but for many families in our particular area, and they looked forward to it. We had people who had attended our church for years, and then some who had moved away, or gone to another fellowship, and then came back for Christmas Eve. It was kind of old home week, we would be saying hi to people that we hadn't seen for a long time at Christmas Eve. And that made it really special. Honestly, it became my favorite service of the year. I love the Christmas season anyway. And celebrating that way was wonderful. And then we do gather with our family. Again, because our kids are married, and they have responsibilities on both sides of their family to be with family at Christmas. We are planning this Christmas to have our own candlelight service with just family. And then we like to kind of open our house for our family members to come just whenever they're able. We try to make it a no-pressure sort of an invitation. It's like, on Christmas Day, come on over if you can. And we'll have leftovers and food, and we'll watch football and just hang out. It's a lot of fun. Sue: So this has been a different Q&A, but this is just a little insight into our past, our current, and our future is yet to be told. Pastor Paul: And maybe this has given you an opportunity to kind of get to know us a little bit beyond the typical Bible questions, and that's kind of fun too. Thanks so much for joining us as we're releasing this video here on the eve of Thanksgiving. We hope that your Thanksgiving is a good one. Even though Thanksgiving is not technically a biblical holiday, there's a biblical basis for it. Sue: Absolutely. Pastor Paul: We as believers should be thankful people. Sue: It's one of the fruits of the spirit. Pastor Paul: Yes, it is and we should be some of the most thankful people on the face of the earth. Give thanks with a grateful heart. The Apostle Paul would say in your prayers, don't forget to give thanks. So give thanks. Thanks so much for joining us for this special Q&A and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.
