There is an element in salvation that doesn't get a lot of air-time these days, so a lot of American Christians get the gospel wrong. This results in many raised in the church not understanding salvation. It also aids those outside the church in misunderstanding or misrepresenting the gospel and Christian teaching.
The earliest teaching we have from Jesus comes in Mark 1. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” (1:15).
"Believe" there is important. So is "repent."
What does it mean to repent? Simply put, repentance is acknowledging that you're going the wrong way and then going the right way. Or to be more specific to salvation, it's realizing you're living in opposition to God and deciding to stop.
Repentance was always part of the message, even if the word wasn't used. The early church packed it into a statement of faith:
If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Rom 10:9)
"Jesus is Lord" may be the earliest creed of the church. It means Jesus is Lord over all, Lord of creation. It also means Jesus is Lord of me. It means I will bend my knee to his will.
The church, in what may be another early statement of faith or hymn, also says one day
at the name of Jesus every knee will bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil 2:10-11)
One day every knee will bow to Jesus, willingly or unwillingly. Christians are the people who do it today and do it willingly.
Is this some kind of add-on to salvation? No, this is what salvation entails. CS Lewis put it this way in Mere Christianity:
[F]allen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. ...
Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off of if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen.
It may look like we can be saved without it because many professing Christians seem to live no differently than the rest of the world. According to Jesus, though, many professing Christians will not be saved (eg, Matt 7:21-23).
Another way to think of it is giving a criminal amnesty. It's not unheard for criminals to be granted amnesty by the government, even rebels who have been involved in an insurrection, as Lewis said. But amnesty is only given to those who have left their life of crime, those who have ceased their rebellion.
Some may object that I'm adding something, saying repentance is required and not just faith. That's not what I'm doing. I'm saying if you believe Jesus is who he said he is, and if you trust in what he did on the cross, repentance is the natural response. If that is missing, your "faith" is not real.
Why can't God just save everyone? Because those who do not believe are still fighting. They can bend the knee now, willingly, or later, after the rebellion is crushed. The gospel is a plea to them to do it now.
"We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God" (2Cor 5:20).
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