Imagine I were a counsellor of some kind, like a marriage counsellor. Imagine that throughout my career I had written many letters to both groups of people and single individuals. But after I had died, only 9 letters written to groups could be found, and 4 letters written to individuals. Some time later, someone has the idea to add chapters and verses to my letters. If you were to take one sentence from one letter and try to tie it together with another sentence from another letter, unless the context surrounding the one agrees with the context surrounding the other, you have just created a false teaching from my letters. The two sentences are in no way, shape, or form related or complementary.
This is what Christians have done with the Bible ever since the addition of chapters and verses. They continuously proof-text the Bible in order to support all sorts of ridiculous and unbiblical teachings. They treat each individual verse as if it is the Word of God wholly by itself, which is simply untrue.
The best way for you to avoid proof-texting the Bible yourself is if you obtain a Reader's Bible without chapters and verses. Chapters and verses are a distraction to the natural structure the biblical authors included in their works, and they subconsciously inform readers of false starting and stopping points. Ever since they were added into the Bible 700 and 500 years ago, Christians have proof-texted Scripture for their own particular doctrines, ripping random, isolated verses out of their immediate contexts and forcing them together with other random, isolated verses by use of Collapsing Context to form teachings that the Bible does not support.
When we understand the epistles in their chronological placement in relation to the book of Acts, and the social-historical context surrounding their writing, figuring in the other side of the conversation that is unavailable to us (we are only hearing one side of a phone conversation), our interpretations will change—as they must. When people begin to understand the full picture, the distorted pictures they have held onto for years, handed to them by their particular denominations, can no longer be sustained. When reading the epistles (or any book), we need to be asking who, what, where, when, and why questions about the writing. This must be our goal if we want to understand and interpret Scripture correctly.