James, Baptism and obedience

As Lent approaches I have been reading the Epistle of James. It is making me very uncomfortable. I am seeing how little I trust God and how often I judge others. And how deeply these things are connected. God help me.
Below is my grammatical and textual exercise in identifying the place of Baptism in James' Epistle. It is nearly worthless but I leave it in as it was what got me started reading the Epistle again.

Some words from James:

22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.
23 Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror
24 and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.
25 But the man who looks intently into the perfect law of liberty, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it—he will be blessed in what he does.

The mirror and the perfect law of liberty are presented in parallel and so refer to the same thing. How odd. looking in a mirror matched with looking intently into the perfect law of liberty.
What then is this law of liberty and how does the idea of a mirror help us to understand it? The original Greek doe not say "sees himself" in the mirror but rather "sees the face of his birth" in the mirror. I don't know anything about patterns of speech in NT Greek so it might just be the normal way of saying "sees himself"....But it's construction sounds so awkwardly different that I think it means exactly what it says. What is the face of a man's birth? I doubt James is talking about baby photos here. Baptism perhaps? This would make the image in the mirror coincide with "the perfect law of liberty". Our baptism gives us a "new face" as Paul says (As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ Galatians 3:27). This connects with the previous text where James refers to the "implanted Logos Who is able to save you" (1:21).
I don't want to get lost in the technicalities of Greek grammar but rather to understand what the Apostle is trying to teach us about the relationship between baptism and obedience. It is the same relationship that he has drawn for us between faith and works. Faith without works is dead. So too, Baptism without doing the works it shows us is dead. Christians who would like to rest on the laurels of baptism and those who would like to rest on their one-time "conversion" are both given a rough ride by James. James also rejects the notion that we will be saved by works apart from Christ as he refers us to the Person of Christ, "the implanted Logos who is able to save".
Our response to Christ in us is our working out of our own salvation with fear and trembling.
"For we are His workmanship, created for good works in Christ."(Ephesians 2:10)