Freedom from Bondage: In America on January 1st 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which was as a presidential declaration and an executive order. In a single stroke the law was changed and the legal status of over 3 million slaves was immediately changed from “slave” to “free”. But history records that being legally free can be an entirely different thing from being functionally free. – News of the slave’s freedom didn’t reach Florida until several months after the Proclamation was drafted. News didn’t reach Texas until Union soldiers marched into Galveston a full two years after the document proclaimed their freedom. For years, legally freed slaves remained in bondage simply because of what they thought was true. Even though they were technically free, they had remained virtual slaves; trapped in a false reality because they did not possess knowledge of the truth by which they could escape their bondage.
Tony Evans
Tony Evans, Victory In Spiritual Warfare, 2011, Oregon: Harvest House Publishing, p.109