There is a verse that says if I do not forgive, God will not forgive me. That frightens me, because some days I genuinely cannot do it.

“If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.”

This is a pilgrim song, sung on the road up to Jerusalem by ordinary people who knew exactly what they were carrying. The opening question is rhetorical and terrifying: if God kept a record, nobody would survive the audit. The answer is not that the record turns out to be small, but that there is forgiveness with him, and the writer says it produces reverence rather than casualness.

“Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?”

In Jesus' parable a servant is released from a debt he could never repay and then immediately jails a man over pocket change. The master's anger is not about failing to hit a quota of forgiveness. It is about a man who took mercy and refused to let it change how he treated anybody else. The warning is aimed at hardness, not at people who are struggling to get there.