Ben Lippen Podcast

The God of Hope

• Ben Lippen Podcast • Season 2 • Episode 3

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In this episode, we sat down with Dale Angstadt, longtime Ben Lippen teacher, husband, and honest disciple of the Word, to trace the true meaning of biblical hope. Mr. Angstadt names hope as a chosen trust in God’s character, not a thin optimism, and walks us through the tangible ways God meets us in the waiting: Abraham’s dust and stars, Mary’s sign in Elizabeth, and the cross anchored in history. These are the handholds that keep faith steady when feelings wobble.

Across the conversation, Scripture frames reality without denial. Romans 8 points to present suffering and future glory, clarifying that the “good” at work is our transformation into the likeness of Christ. Mr. Angstadt shares a raw year marked by illness, surgeries, and helplessness, and yet a paradox emerges: greater hardship creates deeper joy. That shift comes from a crucial question: do we define God by our circumstances, or interpret our circumstances by who God is? From Zechariah’s hesitation to Mary’s trust, perspective becomes discipleship in real time.

We also unpack the practices that grow durable hope: reading the Bible until it shapes our inner speech, abiding in Jesus with a daily conversation, and letting tried faith mature into quiet wisdom. Then comes the outward turn. Jesus calls us salt and light; we cannot share what we do not live. When a life is flavored with hope, people notice. They ask. And we answer with gentleness about the hope within us. This Advent, come learn how to anchor your heart in a God who does not move, even as the world keeps spinning.

If this conversation encouraged you, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs courage today, and leave a review with one practice that helps you keep hope.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to our Advent Podcast series, where we prepare our hearts to celebrate the coming of Christ. During Advent, we remember that God entered our world bringing hope, peace, love, and joy, not as distant concepts, but as gifts fulfilled in Jesus. Each week, you'll hear from a special guest who will share scripture and personal testimony as we reflect on what it means to live in Christ's presence. Whether you're listening at home, in the classroom, or on the go, our prayer is that this conversation draws you closer to the heart of Jesus, who is Emmanuel, God with us.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

And so today I've got with me Dale Angstadt for our first installment where we're going to be talking about hope. So, Mr. Angstadt, will you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do here at Ben Lippen?

Mr. Dale Angstadt:

My name is Dale Angstadt. I'm now in my 35th year of teaching at Ben Lippen, wife and two daughters. And I've taught philosophy and ethics, various Bible courses, humanities. So I've had a wide variety of courses that I've taught. And I'm probably my greatest joy at this point in my teaching career at Ben Lippen is that I'm now teaching the next generation. I'm teaching children of students that I taught in the past. And it's fabulous to see God's faithfulness in the next generation as I teach them.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

Thank you for your faithfulness to Ben Lippen. I know it's been a great blessing to many of us to have you a part of our journey.

Mr. Dale Angstadt:

Thank you.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

All right, so let's dive right into hope. So, Mr. Angstadt, when you think about biblical hope, how do you define it in contrast to despair, discouragement, or despondency?

Mr. Dale Angstadt:

All right. The dictionary defines discouragement as a loss of confidence or enthusiasm, defines despondency as a state of low spirits caused by the loss of hope, despair as the complete loss of hope. And it defines hope as a feeling of expectation or desire for something, the grounds for believing something. And it lists an archaic definition as a feeling of trust. Well, biblical hope is not a feeling of trust. It's a choice to place my confidence in God and who he is. And so as we're unpacking that, I find it interesting that it's actually the loss of hope that the Lord used in my life to bring me to salvation. A child of the 60s, I grew up in that whole generation. And as in that self-adjudant lifestyle, life I went from discouragement to despondency to despair to the utter loss of any hope. Life was absurd, and that's what God used in my life to bring me to Himself.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

So where do you see that connection from your upbringing in the 60s to your connection with hope? Do you see that illustrated anywhere in the Bible?

Mr. Dale Angstadt:

I do, yes. In Hebrews chapter six, the writer of Hebrews is alluding to God's covenant with Abraham, and he says this that God made a covenant with Abraham by two unchangeable things, God's immutability, his unchangeableness, and the fact that God is the God of truth. So Abraham had no Bible to refer to to base his hope upon. So what God does, he gives him concrete things to base it upon. And so Abraham, we know in the narrative in Genesis that God rejects Lot as a potential heir. And then what God does to Abraham is he gives him a tangible sign of telling him that his descendants would be as numerous as dust on the earth. So every evening or afternoon, after a long day of work, Abraham's servants would watch that wash the dust off his feet. So it's a daily reminder of God's promise to him that he would have innumerable descendants. When God rejects Eliezer as a potential heir, Abraham's servant, God then gives him stars and he tells him to try to number them, which obviously Abraham can't. And so now God has given him every night for the rest of his life when he looks up and sees stars, he's reminded that God will give him descendants as numerous as stars in the sky, in addition to as numerous as dust on the earth. So God does that for us. God gives us even today these tangible things such as the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper or communion, that it reminds us that our salvation is secure, it's solid, it's based upon Jesus' death on the cross and his resurrection. And so even now, God gives us these things. So as we see in an advent that Mary, the mother of Jesus, Gabriel in his announcement to her, says, when she asks, Well, how will this be? How can I get pregnant? I've never known a man. And Gabriel tells her that the Holy Spirit will come upon her and the child that she bear will be conceived by the Holy Spirit. And then he reminds her that her cousin Elizabeth, who is well advanced in years, is now pregnant. And so Mary can see then that that which Gabriel promised will happen because he sees it in her cousin Elizabeth. Again, Romans chapter 8 reminds us. In fact, in the Bible that I was looking in NIV, it titles Romans 8, 18 to the end of the chapter as present suffering and future glory. And so it says that hope is not hope if we have it. Hope is something we don't yet have, but we know we're going to get it in the future that God is going to bring it into our lives. Tim Keller says the gospel does not fix everything, it prepares you for everything. So in this chapter in Romans 8, we see that God promises, it tells us life is going to be hard and life is going to be difficult. So the Christian is not immune from life's difficulties and hardships. But what it tells us in that is, and we know that verse that everyone, every Christian knows, Romans 8, 28, and 29, we always allude to. In all things, God works things together for good. But then God defines what that good is in verse 29, in that the good is that God is working in us, He's transforming us into the image of His Son, so that Jesus will be the firstborn among many brethren. So even in life's difficulties, there's hope because we know what God is doing in those difficulties. He's transforming us, he's making us like his son, and so that gives us hope. Again, Romans 15. Paul alludes to God as being a God of hope. And it says then that we can overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. So again, God is a God of hope. He lets us know that we can trust him in life's difficulties and life's hardships. When he's writing to the church at Thessaloniki, 1 Thessalonians 1:3, the ultimate historical demonstration of our hope that we have in God is the cross of Jesus Christ, that our salvation is secure. It's in a historical fact that we can go to.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

Can you share a season of life when you've wrestled with hopelessness and how God restored hope to you in that time?

Mr. Dale Angstadt:

I can. Actually, 2025 has been a particularly difficult year for my wife and I. Phyllis, my wife of 47 years, she has an autoimmune nervous system disorder. And as a consequence of that, it affects every one of her organs, major organs. She lives with chronic pain. She suffers from depression. She's had two major surgeries this year. One was successful, one not so much. It fixed some problems, but it created others. And so, in that, I don't know if I would characterize it as hopelessness, maybe, but as a husband, I felt absolutely helpless. There's not a thing I can do for my wife. As much as I would love to trade my health for her lack of health, I can't. And sometimes it feels like the only thing that I can do for her is to love her and to pray for her. And yet, in the midst of that, feeling helpless, I know that God is working in her life because of what God has said in his word, because he's a God of hope. And in all of this, in this year, the paradoxical thing is that when life gets harder, our love and trust for God grows deeper. That's the paradox. We laugh and joke more than we have in years. It's just we have a great time together, just in the midst of just the difficulty. Life's absurdities are becoming almost, it sounds crazy, but almost fun because we know that we don't know the future, but God does, and we can trust him with our future. The old saying, things couldn't get any worse? Well, sometimes they can. But even when they do, God's grace is sufficient. And his grace enables us to weather or to face those difficulties in life.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

Building off of that, when life feels uncertain or disappointing, what anchors your hope in Christ rather than anchoring in circumstances?

Mr. Dale Angstadt:

Ultimately, our hope in Christ, our hope in God is a matter of the will of our choice and our perspective. Every Christian in all of the history of relationship with God, our challenge is do I define God by the circumstances of life, or do I define life circumstances based upon who God is? That's always our challenge. And so since we're now in the Advent season, we're unpacking these various characteristics of the Advent season. Zachariah, when he's confronted with the potential of finally having a son, he defines that possibility by his wife's old age and her infertility. And as a consequence, Zachariah is a deaf mute for her entire pregnancy. On the other hand, Mary, when Gabriel announces to her that she's going to be pregnant, she looks at her potential to be pregnant by God's ability, and she trusts him, and therefore she bears the savior of humanity. So two different perspectives, and we've seen the outcome in what we call the Christmas story. Ultimately, our hope as Christians is founded on who God is and upon his nature and his character. He's called a rock. He's called a fortress. He's the one thing that never moves in a world that's constantly moving. So he ultimately is our hope. When I was young as a Christian, I thought by the time I was my age, I'm now 74, 53 year old spiritually, I figured by now I'd have everything figured out. I actually have less figured out now than I thought I would. But what one thing as I'm sure of amidst life's uncertainties is the certainty of who God is and the certainty of his word because he's proven himself a God of hope over and over and over and over again. So the crazy thing is sometimes the world's pretty chaotic. I'm actually enjoying chaos because amidst the chaos, God is the absolute certainty and the basis of my hope amidst the hopelessness seemingly in life.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

What spiritual disciplines help you stay rooted in hope during waiting seasons?

Mr. Dale Angstadt:

I guess the questions I'm asking, or just to answer that one, is is my Bible well read or is it rarely read? The word of God is that's our source. That's how we get to know God and who he is. Does God's word permeate my thinking, or is it an intrusion into my usual thought life? Is it something I mole in? Is it something I meditate upon? Is it something that shapes the way I think? So this is how we know who God is and what he's like and what he's done in the past is from his word. John in his gospel, John in his first epistle continually or often uses that word abide. And so is Jesus an acquaintance or is he an intimate friend? Am I fostering that relationship with him on a daily basis? Am I carrying on a conversation with him? Am I, in a sense, praying without ceasing? Do I have a running dialogue with him? So that's those are the disciplines, as in that getting to know God, working on that relationship, abiding in him, spending time with him, carrying on just daily conversations with him. And as I do that, that becomes just that nurtures that hope that I have in God and who he is. Hope and faith are inseparable. You can't separate the two. Peter, in his first epistle, says that God tries our faith so that it becomes pure like gold. Harry Ironside, a 20th century pastor, said this: the older I am in the Lord, the less he tells me what to do. And what he meant by that is the more I get to know God, the deeper I get to know God, the more his word shapes the way I think. I just know what to do. And so I, in a sense, not sounding unspiritual, but I don't need to pray about it because I already know. And so I just, as the Nike ad says, just do it. I just know what God wants me to do. And so ultimately knowing God's intentions is critical. That God is a God of hope, but that's only an academic truth unless I've been in circumstances where I have to hope in him. And that's when the truth of his word is proven in my experience. God becomes a God of hope. God becomes my rock, he becomes my fortress. And the reality of the truth is borne out in my life. And the reason God does that, he doesn't shelter his children from difficulty. He sovereignly and lovingly orchestrates difficulty so that we grow more like his son, but so that people around us get to see what hope looks like. We incarnate that so that they're curious and they wonder. And then that gives us the opportunity as Christians to share with them the hope that we have in him.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

There's a book by Ronald J. Greer called If You Know Who You Are, You Will Know What To Do. And it's about living in integrity. And that circles back around to exactly what you're saying. If you know who you are in the Lord and you have that rich relationship with him in that hope, you'll you'll know what to do. Even if it's hard or difficult, you'll know that path. So I'm glad that you highlighted that. So as we wrap this up, how can we as believers share hope with others and remind them of the hope that we have in Jesus during the season of Advent?

Mr. Dale Angstadt:

I think in general, how we do that is Jesus gave us, in a sense, the principle in the Sermon on the Mount. He said, You are the salt of the earth, you're the light of the world. But we can't share what we don't have, and we can't explain what we aren't modeling. And so when we're living in relationship with God, and God is our hope, and we've learned to trust him, and we've learned to base life on him, and he's become our life. What that does is that others see it, and it's intriguing, and they're curious because we live life differently than they do. That's salt. It makes people curious, it makes them wonder, it intrigues them. And sin, then when they ask us or we have the opportunity, then we can share with them why we have that hope and why Jesus is that hope for our lives. And that's being light. We get to share with them why we are the way we are. Peter says it in 1 Peter 3.15 be ready always to give an answer to every man that asks you a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. So ultimately, we need to be intentional. We're living life with God, with Jesus, intimately, and we're just looking and being aware of those opportunities as we're just living life, a life of hope with the God of hope. And then we just share with people why we are the way we are. So again, God is the God of hope that becomes concrete in our lives when he takes us through difficulties so that we hope in him. And then as we do that, others are curious as they see that and they ask, and then we get to share with them why we have the hope we do.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

Thank you so much for being here with us today. Mr. Angstadt, your words have been of the Lord and very helpful as we are in this season of waiting. If anyone has any questions for you, what is the best way for them to get in contact with you?

Mr. Dale Angstadt:

Probably it would be through email. It's Dale D A L E dot Angstadt A-N-G S T A D T at Ben Lipin One Word B-E-N, L-I-P-P-E-N dot com.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

Great. Thank you so much for being here with us today, and Merry Christmas.

Mr. Dale Angstadt:

Merry Christmas.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for being with us today as we explore the beautiful promises of Advent. We hope these truths deeply inspire you throughout the week, turning the story of Christ into a personal invitation, calling you to walk daily in his hope, peace, love, and joy. We truly look forward to sharing the next step of our Advent journey with you soon.

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Dale Angstadt

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