Is it ok to be good?

I've often struggled with laziness. When I learned about God's sovereignty, that fed my laziness.

In my thinking I thought "If God is in control of everything, what's the point of me doing anything? I can just do nothing!" and I thought I had no choice in anything regarding my life either.

But that is a big lie.

It is true that God is in control of every circumstances that happen in everyone's lives, but we are moral beings who can make and ought to make choices.

God elected people unto salvation, but we ought to consider the cost of following Christ, and actually choose and be committed to following Him.
God woos us and helps us in our weaknesses during our life on earth so we will finally be saved in the end, but we have to draw near to Him, we have to fight our sins.

How that works in detail is a great mystery. But we shouldn't concern ourselves with trying to know the details of how God does things, living believing these truths and acting on them is more beneficial for our souls.

Then I thought about the desire of wanting to be good.

There's a lot of confusion about being good.

Arn't we totally depraved?
Arn't we utterly sinful?
Isn't there no good in me?
Doesn't all our goodness and righteousness come from Christ?
Then what's the point of being good?
Is it even ok to try to be good?

these were a lot of questions that haunted me, and probably a lot of my friends too.

After much thinking, reading the Bible, and listening to what some pastors had to say, I came up with the following conclusions:

• We are sinful because our nature is tainted by sin, that nature produces desires and thoughts that manifest into sinful actions. [Genesis 3, Romans 5:12, James 1:13-15]
• Yet we still retain the image of God with the desire of wanting to be good(Normally)[Genesis 1:26-27, James 3:9]
• God does want us to be good and righteous, the imputation of Christ's righteousness and life in salvation will result in real, tangeble changes towards righteousness in real life(!other wise we might not have obtained Christ at all!) [John 8:11, Matthew 5:20, 1 John 3:7]
• Living a righteous life matters, it makes us good representatives of Christ, thus helps our presentation of the gospel. A bad, morally corrupt Christian taints the name of God.
• Therefore it is a noble desire to want to be good and righteous person, Christians ought to pursue righteousness, but we can't force our self into it.

Now I need to know what righteousness is...... back to more head scratching goodness.