This past June 19th we talked about the holiday Juneteenth in service at Revival Life Church. This isn’t some sort of woke virtue signaling, its what happens when you recognize genuine prophetic signposts.
Abraham signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1st, 1863. This Executive order freed enslaved Americans in the Confederate states two years into the Civil war. As the American troops fought their way south people moved their plantations west to more remote locations away from the advancing army.
By 1865, as the war drew to a close, there were 250,000 enslaved Americans of African decent in west Texas alone. That is an insane number.
The traitor Robert Lee finally surrendered the Confederacy in April of 1865. Despite that, Texas did not surrender until June of that year. But the slaves of Texas did not start getting freed until until General Gordon Granger showed up with American troops on June 19th. This is the date that celebrated as Juneteeth.
The Emancipation Proclamation was not the Victory
Here is the super important part of this story. We don’t celebrate the date of the Emancipation Proclamation. We celebrate the date that everybody got the fulfilment of the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation. To make it personal
I don’t fully celebrate my victory until all my people get free.
In the Spirit-filled church today we are obsessed with the promise and ignorant of the pathway to it’s fulfillment. This is part of the reason why so many people have so many unfulfilled prophetic promises. They were never taught how to live a life of purpose and fell into the trap of what Chris Green calls magical thinking.
I’m glad the Union troops didn’t go home when Lincoln signed the Executive Order and consider it a done deal. Eternally thankful for every person who left father and mother to take up the cause of defeating slavery in the United States through to the end.
The Emancipation Proclamation did not Free Everyone
A little known fact is that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed enslaved people in the Confederacy. Enslaved people in both Delaware and Kentucky were not freed until the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
This is also a prophetic story of America. We will tolerate evil if we think it helps our political goals. Whether it is pro-life groups staying silent about the death penalty or equal rights groups staying silent about life in the womb, it is fully acceptable in the United States to embrace unbalanced scales to gain either political power or wealth.
God hated this in the days of Israel, the days Jesus walked the earth, and today.
Juneteeth is a Prophetic Call to Action
In the prophetic world when we get a prophetic word we act like we graduated already but it’s not time for celebration yet. It’s time to work. It’s time to be transformed to make room for that word to flourish in our lives. It’s time to get freedom in our lives so that we can bring justice and righteousness to the people God has called us to.
We can fully celebrate the freedom those people on the first Juneteenth celebrated while lamenting the absence of equity in our day. We have to embrace the freedom we have received in Christ but we cannot fully celebrate until the least of these in our circles gain the same freedom.