I Corinthians 1:10-13

We could go on, but we do not need to go any further than that. We started here because this division among the people indicated to Paul that something was terribly wrong with the Corinthian church.

These divisions that they had set up among them—declaring some of them that they were Paulites, and the other group saying that they were Apollosites, and the other one said they were, well, I will just say Peterites, and they were following these. And there were a few that said, "Hey, I'm going to follow Christ," and that was good that they were following Christ. And so he pleads with them to be unified, to think and judge in the same way, to have one mind, that is, to judge as Christ would. But the problem there was that they were fighting among themselves. That is contentions there. They had these contentions that were going on, and they could not see eye to eye on anything.

And what had happened is, of course, these divisions had happened, and people started declaring themselves backers of various ministers. Sound familiar? The church of God has been doing something very similar for the last 30 years or so. Now, their partisanship implied deeper problems, especially this lack of wisdom. So Paul was concerned, and he says, I can see just by this reporting from Chloe's household that these problems exist, and these things that you see on the outside are only symptoms of what is rotten on the inside. And that is why he goes on in the next section to talk about wisdom.