Is there a way, in LaTeX, to automatically ***resize font*** of displayed equations to fit column width (`241 pt`, here)?

Any ideas would be appreciated.

You can see my equation below; note that I use `\fontsize{4pt}{4pt}\selectfont` to resize the font, but I need the font to be resized automatically every time. 

```
{\fontsize{4pt}{4pt}\selectfont{\begin{gather}\begin{gathered}{\varphi 
}_{ij}^{q}\left(t\right)=2\left[\dfrac{{S}_{a}}{{L}_{a}^{2}}{e}^{-({\Vert 
{x}_{j}(t)-{x}_{i}(t)-{\Delta }_{ij}^{q}\Vert 
}^{2}/{L}_{a}^{2})}-\dfrac{{S}_{r}}{{L}_{r}^{2}}{e}^{-({\Vert 
{x}_{j}(t)-{x}_{i}(t)-{\Delta }_{ij}^{q}\Vert 
}^{2}/{L}_{r}^{2})}+\left(\dfrac{{S}_{r}}{{L}_{r}^{2}}+\dfrac{{S}_{r}}{{L}_{a}^{2}}\right){e}^{(-1/{L}_{r}^{2}+1/{L}_{a}^{2})({\Vert 
{x}_{j}(t)-{x}_{i}(t)-{\Delta }_{ij}^{q}\Vert 
}^{2})}\right].\label{eq6}\end{gathered}\end{gather}}}

```