Not knowing anything about Governor Sanford's beliefs in a Supreme Being, I can only guess (as Dynrepsys, above, has pointed out) he is speaking of God in the abstract.
Perhaps an illustration would he helpful. Let's say a young person who has just graduated from college is thinking about entering the teaching profession. He might say to himself,
"What kind of teacher do I want to be? Well, I'd like to be a teacher who is excited about his subject matter, who cares about his students, and who considers teaching to be a true calling in life."
Similarly, Mr. Sanford, at some point, has also asked an abstract question:
"What kind of a God do I worship?"
He perhaps answered the question in this way:
"I worship a God who forgives, and a God who forgives us more than just once, but many times, because that is the kind of God He is--a forgiving and merciful God."
Being a Christian believer, I too believe in a God who forgives us when we confess our sins to Him. To confess means to call our sin what God calls it. To confess is not to minimize our sins and say, "Oh, I guess I messed up," or "Oops, I made a mistake," or "Oh well, I'm only human." To confess means to say to God with sincerity
"God, I committed the sin of ______________" (fill in the blank).
In the blank could be any number of sins: pride, lust, greed, selfishness, impatience, a short temper, resentment, envy, and jealousy, to list just a few).
To confess, however, is only one side of the coin. The other side is to repent. To repent is to do an about-face, to make a 180-degree turn. To sin is to walk in the wrong direction--toward sin and away from God. To repent is to turn around and walk in the right direction--away from sin and toward God.
Interestingly, very few people can continue walking in the "right" direction for very long before they sin again (perhaps the same sin they have already confessed and repented of). In a moment of weakness they give in to the sin once again, and so the cycle of confession and repentance starts all over again.
How many times does God forgive us? That's a complex and ultimately unanswerable question. On the one hand, "The LORD is gracious and merciful; Slow to anger and great in lovingkindness. The LORD is good to all, And His mercies are over all His works" (Holy Bible, Psalm 145:8,9). On the other hand, we must never presume upon God's patience and forgiveness. Our sin is an offense to God and to His holiness. In Him there is no sin. We, by contrast, are sinners, whether we have committed one sin or a million sins. We all fall short of God's standard of perfection.
The good news, according to the Christian faith, is that God's Son, Jesus Christ, came into this world almost 2000 years ago to take care of the sin problem. He, the sinless Son of God, took our sin upon himself when he submitted willingly to crucifixion, perhaps the most agonizing form of capital punishment ever devised by man. Why did he do it? Because he loves us and wants us to have a relationship with him that can begin here on earth and continue in heaven when we die.
Again, according to the Christian faith, we can earn neither this relationship with God nor the forgiveness that comes with it; rather, they are gifts from God. We receive them by faith. As someone once said, there is something to believe, and someone to receive. The "something to believe" is that when Jesus died for the sins of the world, He died for you, and for me, and for every living soul, past, present, and future. The "someone to receive" is the resurrected, living, and loving Son of God, Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world.
Will putting our faith in Jesus and receiving him into our lives as Savior and Lord prevent us from sinning? No. Once we become God's children through the new birth, however, our old sinful nature is miraculously transformed into a new nature. God cleans our hearts within us, and then gives us not only a new sensitivity to sin but a supernatural ability to resist sin. Moreover, when we do sin, if we confess our sin, he is faithful and just to forgive our sin and to cleanse us from it, on the basis of Jesus' death on our behalf.
That, in a nutshell, my friend, is the Christian good news. In a word: Jesus.
