These are what I think are the main ideas in the gospel. Just for the record.
All of these are important when explaining it to your children. All of them are clearly seen in the Bible
Each human is sinful.
God is holy and just.
Sinful beings cannot enter into communion with a holy God.
Christ lived a human life and never sinned.
Christ willingly died – taking our punishment.
Christ rose again – he has defeated death.
Because of this – if we accept the gift – we can be seen by God as holy.
Salvation is an accomplishment of faith, not of good works.
It’s like this:
The person saved by God will then move towards greater obedience towards Him.
Not this:
A person with greater obedience towards God will then be saved by Him.
Two more thoughts for when you talk about the gospel with your children –
1. Make it personal. Change “Each human is sinful” to “You and I are sinful”
2. Make it big. Our sin isn’t trivial – it’s betrayal. That we can’t be with God is not bad news, it’s the worst possible news. That Jesus has found a way to save us is not good news, it’s the best possible news.
Did I miss anything?
Responsible Father 
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May 5, 2014 at 4:29 pm
5 Signs Your Child Is Not Saved | Responsible Father
[…] spell out the gospel An eighteen year old will be more able than a four year old to explain the significant ideas in the gospel, but all saved children will be able to lay out the basics of the gospel in plain […]
May 14, 2014 at 9:53 am
Karen
Actually, this is the “gospel” according to the Penal Substitution theory of the Reformers. This is inadequate to me (and to historic Christian faith) because in aspects where it is correct, it demonstrates only the most superficial understanding of the nature of “salvation” in Christ, and where it is off, it gives a highly distorted understanding of God’s motivation in why Jesus had to die and what that accomplishes in the believer (i.e., legal status papering over our sin vs. ontological change transforming us progressively from the inside out). It also doesn’t explain very well why Romans 5:10 says that it is Christ’s “life” (i.e., resurrection) that “saves” us. I believe the gospel according to the classical Christian (and Orthodox) understanding does more justice to the full teaching of the Scriptures in their own context. Here’s a summary of the contrast in the two views (using chairs):
The full and real gospel was also much more appealing and understandable to me as a child, which I gleaned simply from listening to the Gospel stories about Jesus in my Methodist Sunday School (and from C.S. Lewis Narnia series). I fell in love with Jesus then, and I have never fallen out of love, though my love for Him is feeble and frail. The clear view of Him shown in the Liturgy of my Orthodox Christian faith and in the lives of its Saints continually reveals to me also the depth of my own sin. I don’t need anyone to rationally point that out.
I’ve discovered when you stop obscuring the full beauty and wonder of Christ in His unfailing Self-giving love in the real gospel, you don’t have to go out of your way to try to rationally impress upon even a child the awfulness of sin. This will become self-evident (and then it will also be progressively rendered impotent) in the glorious light of Christ who transforms us by His love when we finally truly see and experience it.
If you want your children to know Christ and to be saved, you need to have a proper understanding of salvation yourself and demonstrate it to them more than you try to speak it. It is deeply disturbing to me as a Christian parent to see a father announcing publicly in a blog like this to thousands of strangers that he believes four of his children are still “unsaved.” I can’t imagine what this is doing to the heart and souls of your children who are being judged by such reductionist and fallible human criteria (your own limited perceptions). I can’t imagine it can do anything but obscure for them all (“saved” and “unsaved” alike) the glory and love of Christ. In fact, your judgmental approach may be responsible for hardening the hearts of the children of yours you deem “unsaved.” Could they be the ones who actually have the more sensitive hearts and who are simply trying to protect themselves from the harsh condemning Judge they perceive God and their father to be?
May 14, 2014 at 10:49 am
jamsco
Thanks, Karen, for your thoughtful comments. I watched the video and it helps me understand where you’re coming from. I agree with much (most) of how he describes the Gospel and I don’t think it’s as far from my Gospel as he would suggest. For example, I agree with the idea that God searches out and finds lost sinners.
Your comments make me think that you think that everyone is saved. Is that true?
May 14, 2014 at 2:41 pm
Karen
No, I don’t believe all are necessarily appropriating the salvation Christ won for all on the Cross and by His Resurrection.
What I do believe is that the Reformer’s model of Penal Substitution strings bits of biblical data together on an unbiblical Medieval Scholastic and Enlightenment framework/paradigm, distorting the gospel and making it unnecessarily difficult for deeply morally sensitive and reflective people to embrace the true gospel (which it fails to adequately express).
What I also believe is that human spiritual perception is flawed and can be wrong even about those closest to us, and that the workings of grace in the human heart (even our own) are a mystery often for the most part hidden from us. “Man looks on the appearance, but God looks on the heart.” Those who start well can finish badly in the faith and vice versa (consider Judas, who was one of the Twelve Disciples, and the repentant thief crucified next to Jesus). Even the hearts of those of us who have consciously “believed” on Christ as “Lord and Savior,” are still often divided between good and evil on an experiential day-to-day basis, and those who would say they don’t believe in Christ may nonetheless in many ways show a responsiveness to the conviction of the Holy Spirit in their hearts trusting Christ in practice, though anonymously, as He speaks in their conscience, as shown by the genuine works of compassion His conviction empowers them to do. We are all a work in progress, and Christ explicitly instructs us not to judge between wheat and tares before both have matured.
My conviction is the role of a parent is not to judge “saved vs. unsaved” in any definitive sense with regard to his children (much less announce that judgment to others), but to figure out how he/she can best nurture a hopeful trust in Christ’s grace and love in his child and instruct his children in obedience to Christ’s commands from wherever they presently are. This is overwhelmingly in my experience something accomplished only through the secret workings of God’s grace (where prayer is paramount) and almost completely through the things we model (often unconsciously even) as parents rather than those things we say we believe or try to explicitly teach.
May 15, 2014 at 1:23 pm
jamsco
Again, it’s apparent that you’ve put some thought into this.
Would you say that a parent should not try to determine if their child is saved? I think we should and I think God’s word is a resource that we can use to do it.
I’m guessing that when you mentioned Narnia – were you talking about the Calormene guard at the end of Last Battle?
I agree with much of what you’re saying here and almost all of what you say in the last two paragraphs.
May 15, 2014 at 4:39 pm
Karen
When I mentioned Narnia, I was talking about the character of Aslan as revealing the heart of God, and the nature of atonement as presented in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which C. S. Lewis uses the Ransom model of the early Church, rather than the strongly Reformed “Penal Substitution” model. Yes, I have been giving all this a lot of thought for many years! 🙂
According to the depth of our own spiritual sensitivity to God, I think we can get a sense if our children are responding to the conviction of the Holy Spirit or not in their lives and nurture that responsiveness. I do not believe this is simply a matter of intellectually knowing what Scripture says as logical propositions and theories about what constitutes “salvation” and working from some kind of biblical checklist, though. What I’m leery of is an externalized, appearance-focused, man-centered approach to the question of salvation. I’m also leery of reductionist definitions of salvation, which regard it merely as a “status” one has or does not have. Our own human parsing of Scripture is not really enough here to guide our understanding of what God is doing in a child’s heart, but I do believe our own attempts to come to terms with the Person of Christ, His claims on our life, and our own active engagement of the struggle to put His commands into practice in our own lives can give us a capacity for discernment not just of what the Scripture says, but what it means and how it applies in our lives and someone else’s in a particular circumstance. Then through prayerful listening to our children and the Holy Spirit, we can get a sense of what He is doing in them (or how or where they are either responding to or resisting Him).
Our perceptions are not going to be infallible, though. Sometimes faith is hidden like a seed deep in my child that is only slowly starting to germinate and the fruit is still imperceptible, and other times what looks like faith is a fleeting emotional state or a performance given to please mom or dad and not a real response to the love of Christ. Sometimes kids can parrot what they’ve heard or been told, but this doesn’t mean they understand. Other times, they are incapable of articulating something they very obviously have an intuitive understanding of, and we can tell this because of what they do.
Don’t get me wrong–I want my children to grow in a proper understanding of the gospel, of the Person and work of Christ, and learn how to discern His Presence and activity in their lives. Getting them to the point where they can accurately articulate the fundamental truths of the faith is a worthy goal. My own conviction is salvation in terms of our personal appropriation of it in this life is more a matter of a process of working out of our salvation, though, and I have found it more profitable to put the focus on Christ, on His faithfulness and His truth, and not on my own powers of discernment or how someone’s life merely appears.
Salvation is a process that can become regress, too, if we allow ourselves to get lured into temptation by the enemy. I do not regard personal appropriation of the salvation we have received in Christ as a one-time decision and status, but a dynamic relationship in which we begin to trust in the truth of the gospel and respond in obedience to Christ’s commands, growing in our capacity for faith and Christlikeness from “glory to glory”. Sometimes it is difficult to tell exactly when and how that process starts (and I’m always hopeful because my focus is on Christ), and even when someone is jumping through all the right hoops according to whatever Christian subculture they’re being raised in, appearances can be deceiving and it can be nothing more than hoop-jumping and not reflective of where their heart is at relative to God. Does this make sense?
I appreciate your patience with me. Thank you for your kind engagement with my thoughts.
August 23, 2017 at 12:47 am
Six Situations That Aren’t Signs That Your Child Isn’t Saved | The Responsible Puppet
[…] let’s say you have a son or daughter who understands, believes and loves the gospel. You see real spiritual fruit and sanctification in their life and you feel they are walking with […]