Read the whole passage straight through before you dig into a single verse. The details make a lot more sense once you already know where the passage is headed.
A verse pulled out on its own can say almost anything. Read enough around it and it can only say one thing.
Try the 20/20 rule. Before you settle on the verse you want to study, read twenty verses before it and twenty verses after. That is roughly a full chapter on either side, enough to catch the argument in progress: who is speaking, who is listening, what happened just before, what changes right after. The verse you started with was never standing alone. It was one sentence in somebody’s speech, one link in somebody’s story.
Forty verses sounds like a lot until you actually do it. It takes ten minutes, maybe less. When you come back to your verse, it does not read the same. It reads like something you found rather than something you were handed.