Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was.  But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does. (Jam 1:21-25 NKJ)

Three things James is telling us here.  First, all the Holy Spirit to declutter your life, the theological term would be sanctification. If you invited me to dinner, I would be impressed with how beautiful you home looked, the food and the fellowship.  But, at the end of the night, I insisted on inspecting all the rooms and closets in the house. Shock and horror ensued because you knew that where you keep all the junk. Our lives can be the same. So room by room the Spirit of God wants to clean up and throw out.

Second, implant the Word of God into your life.  Having cleaned house, don’t leave space, fill the space with the Word of God.  Then having received the Word, put it into practice.

Third, this is the metaphor of the mirror, the work of the Father. Whenever my parents wanted to get my attention their first instruction would be ‘look at me,’ they wanted to get my attention. When my heavenly father wants to get my attention he calls me to look at him, to look into his holiness.  This is the part we try to avoid because when we look in, he also looks into us and reflects back to us the perfect image in which we were made, what a beautiful experience. Yet some people have seen what God is striving for choose to walk away and replace the perfect image with something less than.

All three are really one, and they are working in you.