Imagine someone's exposure and understanding of American football being composed solely of watching highlight videos of just the kicker and punter. There would be scenes of punting on fourth down, the kick-off, extra-point kicks, and field goals. This would allow a person to understand some things about the game of football. A person could understand how the ball moves (sometimes) and how points are scored (at least some of the time). But this, of course, would not be a full understanding. Such a de-contextualized "understanding" of football would miss many of the details and connections between actions in the full game of football. Even the significance of the actions viewed in the highlight reel would not be weighted properly--being either over-valued or under-valued. Such a limited understanding of football would miss the center and weightiest part of scoring in football, namely the touchdown. It would all miss the central movement of the football, namely the movement of the ball by running and passing.
This is good analogy for how some people cherry-pick a few sayings or deeds from Jesus' life without placing them in the larger pattern of his thought and life. This is to fundamentally misunderstand Jesus. A "pick-and-choose" approach to Jesus will miss the center of his teaching and misunderstand the connections and significance of Jesus' teaching and actions.
To focus on the love of Jesus or his concern for the poor to the exclusion of the larger contextual themes of the Kingdom of God and the person of Christ Jesus himself is to fundamentally misunderstand Jesus and his message. D. A. Carson's words on "love" in the Scriptures are relevant here:
I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God—to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity.
The result, of course, is that the love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized.[1]
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[1] D. A. Carson The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Crossway, 2000), 11.
